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HELPS 


TO A BETTER 

CHRISTIAN LIFE 


New Readings for Lent 


COMPILED BY THE 

Rev. George Wolfe Shinn, D.D. 


Rector of Grace Church, Newton, Mass. 


NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 

L 


TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

Library of CQBgirQf* 

0fflee o f tN 

MAR 19 1900 


Keglotor of Copyright* 

^\J fill 

S tfk 


56827 


Copyright, 1900, 

By THOMAS WHITTAKER 


SECOND COPY, 

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V, ^ o o 




PREFACE 


The growing usage of more frequent services 
during Lent has increased the demand for suitable 
readings. It is too much of a task for busy cler¬ 
gymen to prepare fresh sermons or lectures, how¬ 
ever brief, day by day for all this period and so it 
may be helpful to have at hand a collection of 
suitable productions from other pens, which can be 
read for the instruction of the people who come to 
worship in the House of God in quiet Lenten hours. 
There should be no hesitation about substituting 
such readings for hastily prepared and insufficiently 
studied addresses. The reader can put his heart 
into the printed message if he will, and can make 
it his own message to his people by previous study 
and a word of explanation. 

There are many collections of readings for Lent 
in print, but some of them are not as well suited 
now for their purpose as they were formerly. 

Their style, their illustrations, their arguments 
and their appeals belong to past generations. The 
people of our day have grown accustomed to other 
ways of putting things. 

One merit of the present compilation is that it 
contains the fresh and vigorous thoughts of men of 
our own time, with all their warm interest in the 
3 


4 


PREFACE. 


life of our day. It is hoped that this volume may 
not only be a relief for busy clergymen, but that it 
may offer an unusually large amount of helpful 
and stimulating matter for the consideration of 
those who come to the Lenten services that they 
may be helped in their efforts to lead sober, right¬ 
eous and godly lives. 

The book will serve another purpose. Lent is 
the time for the home-reading of religious litera¬ 
ture ; especially that kind which aims to quicken 
the spiritual life of the individual. It is believed 
that the selections contained in this volume will be 
found helpful in that way. The average layman, 
however eager he may be for religious instruction, 
no doubt often finds religious reading rather dull. 
This objection will probably not apply to this book, 
for, while the selections are all far from being com¬ 
monplace, they are within the comprehension of 
any one who will read them thoughtfully, and they 
are certainly expressed in vigorous English. 

While the book is especially suited for Lenten 
days it may be found useful at other times for home¬ 
reading and for those public occasions when a 
printed discourse must be used by the lay reader, 
or even by the clergyman, instead of original matter. 
In these cases the dates are to be disregarded, and 
the selections made by topics. Each selection is 
complete in itself, and may be read aloud in from 
ten to twelve minutes. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

On Keeping Lent. 7 

I. The Message from the Wilderness.13 

II. True Repentance.18 

III. The Use and Benefit of Fasting.23 

IV. The Temptation of Our Lord.29 

V. The Spiritual Life. 35 

VI. We Find Ourselves in the Scriptures.40 

VII. We Find Christ in the Scriptures.47 

VIII. The Feeding of the Multitude.54 

IX. What if We Turn from Christ ?.59 

X. Christ and the Day of Rest.64 

XI. Love Your Neighbor.69 

XII. Use Your Opportunities.76 

XIII. On Being Helpful to Others.82 

XIV. Responsibility for Others.87 

XV. Mutual Help.93 

XVI. No One Else Can Do Our Duty . . '..98 

XVII. The Soul’s Need and God’s Nature.102 

XVIII. How We are Trained by the Church.107 

XIX. Agencies for the Soul’s Training.111 

XX. Who are the Good? Who are the Bad? . . .117 

XXI. How can the Sense of Religion be Strength¬ 
ened? .123 

XXII. A Warning Lest We Lose What We Have . . . .129 

XXIII. Prayer is Reasonable.135 

XXIV. Prayer is not Contrary to Nature.139 

XXV. Idleness . . ..144 

XXVI. Truthfulness.150 

XXVII. Being and Doing.155 


5 




























6 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

XXVIII. Having Some Part with Our Lord in Suf¬ 
fering .160 

XXIX. God’s Best Comes Last.166 

XXX. Crucifying the Old Nature.172 

XXXI. You Must Face Danger to Gain Benefit . . 177 

XXXII. Living in Christ. 186 

XXXIII. The Life of Consecration. 192 

XXXIV. Our Lord Weeping Over the Sins of Men. . 198 

XXXV. Nothing but Leaves.204 

XXXVI. The Great Remedy.*. 210 

XXXVII. The Solitude of Christ in Redemption . . .216 
XXXVIII. “The Night in which HF was Betrayed” . 223 

XXXIX. The Cross the Key of Life. 229 

XL. In Paradise.235 











Helps to a Better Christian Life. 


ON KEEPING LENT. 

Keeping Lent is following a very old Christian 
usage, for a fasting period coming just before 
Easter can be traced back to the second century. 

It is true that in the early times there were vary¬ 
ing rules as to its length and how to keep it, but 
gradually large portions of the Church adopted the 
forty days period as we have it now. We get our 
name for the period from the Saxon. The word 
“ Lent ” means the lengthening time, when the days 
grow longer, that is, the spring. In ordinary usage 
Lent refers to the fasting period that comes before 
Easter. It is the Spring Fast. The first day is 
Ash Wednesday and the last day is Easter Even. 
The six Sundays between are not counted as fast 
days, for Sundays are always Festivals. 

Omitting these you will see that it can be called 
“ The Forty Days of Lentf while the Sundays are 
“The Sundays in Lent. ,, It is the period that 
commemorates our Lord’s stay of forty days in the 
wilderness where He fasted and was tempted. 

It also commemorates all His sorrows, for He 
was a Man of Sorrows, but especially those bitter 
sufferings which came at the end of His earthly so- 

7 


8 


ON KEEPING LENT. 


journ, culminating in the agony of Gethsemane and 
the cross of Calvary. 

Lent is a time for meditation, for special devo¬ 
tions, for withdrawal as much as possible from the 
world, for penitence and humiliation, and for self- 
denial. The great purpose has been to deepen the 
religious life, and so to become more like Christ. 

So important is it to grow into the likeness of 
our Lord that men have urged most earnestly the 
keeping of this season with all devotion, as if it were 
our going into the wilderness to be alone with 
Christ. An old poet thinking of the blessed results 
of a well-kept Lent speaks of it as “ the dear feast 
of Lent.” The discipline is merged into the happy 
results of the discipline so that the well-used fast 
becomes the refreshing feast. 

Says George Herbert: 


" Welcome, dear feast of Lent. Who loves not thee 
He loves not temperance or authority, 

But is composed of passion. 

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone, 

Is much more sure to meet with Him than one 
That traveleth byways.” 


One very marked feature in the observance of 
this season is Fasting. We are bidden to fast, but 
fasting is not simply doing without food or ex¬ 
changing one kind of food for another. Fasting, 
in a religious sense, means abstinence from our ac¬ 
customed enjoyments and adding to the welfare of 
others. It requires us to live upon plainer food and 
to use a smaller quantity. It bids us give up 


ON KEEPING LENT. 


9 


luxuries, and to turn away from entertainments and 
festivities, and to avoid sumptuous display in dress. 

But turning from these is not an end in itself. 
There must be the turning toward something better, 
so that Lent must become a season of growth in re¬ 
ligious knowledge and devotion, and in ability to 
bless others by the extension of goodness to them. 

The Collect for the first Sunday in Lent carries 
the right view of abstinence. It is thus put into 
verse by T. W. Parsons : 

“ O Lord, who forty days, didst for our sake 
And forty nights, nor bread nor wine partake, 

Give us Thy grace such abstinence to use, 

As may all superfluity refuse : 

So that our flesh may lend the spirit space 
To grow toward God, and with obedient pace 
Follow Thy godly motions, and the will 
Of righteousness and holiness fulfil.” 


Years ago a favorite book among many people 
was “Nelson’s Companion to the Festivals and 
Fasts.” 

It is almost forgotten now, but here is a quota¬ 
tion from it which is worth remembering. 

“ How should Christians spend their time dur¬ 
ing this season of Lent ? 

“ To express our sorrow for our transgressions we 
should practice the duties of abstinence and fasting 
according to the circumstances of our health and 
our outward condition in the world. Our external 
behavior should correspond with the humiliation 
and seriousness we now profess. Public assemblies 
for pleasure and diversion should therefore now be 


10 


OK KEEPING LENT. 


avoided and the festivities of social intercourse in 
some degree abated. The public services of the 
Church should be regularly and reverently at¬ 
tended, and we should devote more than the usual 
portion of our time to religious retirement, to self- 
examination, penitence and prayer and to acts of 
charity and mercy.” 

Bishop Jeremy Taylor spoke of “the holy in¬ 
tervals when we are called off from the world to 
the acts and employments of religion, and when we 
are bidden to do honor to God and to think of 
heaven with hearty purpose and peremptory de¬ 
sign.” While we take care that “ all the other por¬ 
tions of our time be hallowed with little retire¬ 
ments of our thoughts and short conversations with 
God, and all along be hallowed with pious inten¬ 
tion,” we may think of Lent as one of “ the holy 
intervals.” 

How shall we make the best use of the holy in¬ 
terval of Lent? Said Bishop Huntington, “We 
need voluntary acts of self-denial whether to bring 
down and humble pride, to chasten fleshly propensi¬ 
ties, to clear the soul for prayer, to provide larger 
charities for Christ’s missions and His poor, or to 
honor God by a simple act of obedience to His 
word. 

“ How many need to lay a cross on their lips, to 
fast from strife and debate, from slander and idle 
* words. Here are the ashes we are to sprinkle and 
the sackcloth we are to wear. Lent is for human 
kindnesses, neighborly sympathy, family tenderness. 
Learn in it to love the brotherhood and to visit the 


OK KEEPING LENT. 


11 


poor. Hate nothing so much as hatred. Drop 
every grudge and revenge out of your heart. Live 
fairly with men. God makes the path of obedience 
to Himself to be the path of honesty and sweet 
temper and loving kindness to His children. The 
road of duty will still be narrow, but in it you will 
breathe the immortal air, and every deepening 
breath will be an inspiration of the life eternal.” 





I. 


Ash Wednesday—The First Day of Lent. 

The Message From the Wilderness. 1 

“ And He was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan: 
and was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered unto Him.” 
—St. Mark i. 13. 

Our thoughts are turned to-day to our Master 
in the silence, the solitude and the trials of His 
forty days in the wilderness. His Lent was char¬ 
acterized by retirement, devotion and abstinence. 
Let us see what message may be thought of as 
coming to us to-day from that wilderness. When 
we think of Him who fasted and prayed and was 
tempted we know that the message first tells us of 
His being_prjapared . there for His life’s work and 

life’s_battle, of His gaining., .strength. Jbhere from 

communion with God, and of His learning obedi¬ 
ence there through painful discipline. 

How do His retirement and devotion and absti¬ 
nence appeal to us ? What message do these bring ? 
First there is an appeal to us to find time to breathe 
a calmer atmosphere and draw nearer to the eternal 
verities. 

We all feel the pace at which we live. Energy 
in work, absorption in business, excitement in pleas- 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. John Ellerton, Rector of the Church at 
Barnes, England. 

43 -- 



14 THE MESSAGE FROM THE WILDERNESS. 


ure, activity in our very amusements : these are the 
conditions of our time. There are not a few, even 
here, to whom, were it not for Sunday, home would 
be but the place of the evening meal and the short 
night’s rest. Leisure for thought, for books, for 
fireside communing, for the “ children’s hour,” for 
such friendships as go deeper than the surface of 
society, it is hard, indeed, to find. At best, such 
leisure is taken almost by stealth from the time de¬ 
manded ever more and more eagerly by the imperi¬ 
ous calls of professional or commercial life. House¬ 
hold cares and duties must necessarily follow the 
same rule, and make it almost as hard for the mis¬ 
tress as for the master of a family to feel at leisure. 
In such a time as this, what becomes of self-recollec¬ 
tion, of meditation, of devotion ? What nourishment 
can be found for the inner life ? What spare hour to 
trim the lamp of faith, or tighten the girdle of self- 
discipline ? What place for the knowledge of our¬ 
selves and of God? We ought, indeed, jealously 
to guard the quiet of our Sundays from the en¬ 
croachment of a restless age, which has fixed its 
covetous eye on the one day in seven as yet not 
quite invaded by labor. But just as you find that 
your physical frame requires the refreshment of 
your brief annual holiday, in addition to the Sun¬ 
day rest, so, be assured, your inner life, your spir¬ 
itual nature, craves likewise for a time of stillness 
and repose. To some extent Lent may help to sup¬ 
ply this want. The quiet week-day service in 
church, the change in the character of your read¬ 
ing, the curtailment of amusements that there may 


THE MESSAGE FROM THE WILDERNESS. 15 

be more time for self-recollection and prayer; the 
withdrawal from the usual round of social enter¬ 
tainments—not as a penance, not with ostentatious 
asceticism, but as a help toward living for a while 
in a stiller and calmer atmosphere, and there draw¬ 
ing nearer to the eternal realities—all these may 
help you somewhat, if you will, to mitigate the 
pressure which leaves your souls no time to breathe, 
and may strengthen you, as retirement strengthened 
your Master, to endure unshaken the countless 
trials of a very busy life. 

Second, the Message appeals to us for self-denial. 
Christ in the wilderness witnesses to an age of self- 
indulgence. 

I do not desire to exaggerate the evils of our 
time. In every generation the theme of the 
preacher has been the luxury, the extravagance, 
the license, the irreligion around him. In some re¬ 
spects we are better than our fathers. We have 
outgrown the unbridled insolence of the middle 
ages, the shameless coarseness of the eighteenth 
century. Yet surely no one can deny the enor¬ 
mous growth of a refined, wide-spread, complicated 
self-indulgence. It becomes a task of peculiar dif¬ 
ficulty for modern Christians, especially those who 
have sufficient means for enjoyment, to keep up a 
high standard of simplicity and plainness in living; 
and yet no denunciation or ridicule of modern lux¬ 
ury can be of the slightest avail in checking its 
growth without the influence of example. It is 
personal self-indulgence which lies at the root of 
domestic and social extravagance. Circumstances 


16 THE MESSAGE FROM THE WILDERNESS. 

change; society becomes more or less favorable to 
purity and plainness of living; but human nature 
is the same. In each one of us, now just as much 
as in St. Paul’s day, there is a flesh which must be 
subdued to the spirit, a body which must be kept 
under and brought into subjection. For his own 
sake, no less than for the sake of others, a Chris¬ 
tian in the midst of our modern society ought to 
consider it a bounden duty to cultivate habits of 
personal frugality and abstemiousness. A wise and 
temperate association of abstinence with devotion, 
at special times, both quickens the energy of prayer, 
and braces the will for self-discipline. Christ knew 
what He was doing when He went into the wilder¬ 
ness. We cannot doubt that He intended to fast; 
that He deliberately coupled a season of special ab¬ 
stinence with a season of special prayer; knowing 
that it was good for Himself and for a man that 
the two should at times go together. Hot all the 
follies and mistakes, old and new, that have gath¬ 
ered round the observance of fasting days and sea¬ 
sons, ought to be allowed to blind us to this truth. 
Say what you please about old rules being obsolete, 
and modern observances fantastic or unreal, you 
cannot escape from recognizing the part which 
fasting played in the devotional life of Himself and 
His apostles. If it be true that such fasting as 
some church people now practice is not a very 
strong protest against universal self-indulgence, nor 
a very efficient help toward resisting its influence, 
still it is no less true that the duty lies at our door 
of making that protest more real. A continual ex- 


THE MESSAGE FROM THE WILDERNESS. 17 

ample of simplicity of life is better, no doubt, than 
an intermittent example of abstinence. And such 
a continual example each of us ought to try to set. 

Third. But we have not fully learned the lesson 
of our Master’s wilderness life unless we are per¬ 
suaded that the body must be subdued in special 
seasons of devotion. If it is to be kept in subjec¬ 
tion to the rule of the spirit in seasons of action or 
of recreation, it must be subdued in seasons of de¬ 
votion. Buies are of man, for the particular time, 
for the local Church, for the individual. They are 
of the letter that may change; but principles are 
Divine, and permanent, and universal. And as we 
follow in thought our Master into the wilderness, if 
we seek for a detailed rule we shall find nothing, 
but if we try to grasp the principle on which He 
acted, we shall see that as lonely thought disciplines 
the mind for active exertion, and communion with 
God for communion with our neighbors, so the 
willing restraint of even the blameless appetites of 
our lower nature is a wise and useful help toward 
setting free the higher nature for closer intercourse 
with God and spiritual influence among men. 

Thus then the message from the wilderness speaks 
to us of withdrawal from the rush of the world, of 
self-denial, and of the subduing of the body. 


II. 


Thursday—The Second Day of Lent. 

True Repentance. 1 

“ I said I will confess my sins unto the Lord; and so Thou for- 
gavest the wickedness of my sin.” —Psalm xxxii. 6. 

Without True Repentance there is no pardon 
for sin. God is ready to forgive sin, but only on 
the condition that the sinner repent. 

It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that we 
should know in what true repentance consists. 

Contrition means sorrow for sin, confession means 
the acknowledgment of sin, and purpose of amend¬ 
ment means a firm resolve, with the assistance of 
God’s grace, never to fall again. 

When we confess our sins we should do it with 
sorrow that we have been guilty and with a de¬ 
termination to amend our lives. 

Sorrow for sin is different from remorse. The 
difference between remorse and contrition is this, 
remorse regards self, contrition looks to God. We 
feel remorse when we fear the consequences of sin, 
we feel contrition when we regret having offended 
God. 

If we are to receive pardon for our many trans¬ 
gressions we must seek to obtain true contrition for 

Adapted from some sermons delivered by the Rev. S. Baring 
Gould, M. A., of England. 

18 


TRUE REPENTANCE. 


19 


them. When a murderer has committed his crime, 
he fears, and is sorry, and haunted with terror. He 
wishes he had never committed the deed, because 
he fears the consequences; that is remorse. So, in 
a smaller way, when you have done wrong you 
regret it, and wish you had been wiser, or less 
weak, and that what is done were undone, because 
of the consequences. That, again, is remorse, not 
contrition. God is not taken into account in that 
sorrow. 

Try then , to realize what contrition really means. 
You can only attain to it by looking to God, and 
considering what He has done for you, and how 
ungrateful you have been. You sadly deceive 
yourself if you regard remorse as equivalent to 
contrition. There is nothing healing in remorse. 
The devils endure that, and are no better for it. 
St. Paul well describes the effects of true repent¬ 
ance. “ Behold this self-same thing, that ye sor¬ 
rowed after a goodly sort, what carefulness it 
wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves, 
yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, yea, what 
revenge.” (2 Cor. vii. 2.) Carefulness not again 
to enter into the temptation under which you fell, 
cleaning of the conscience by a good confession, 
indignation with yourself for your ingratitude, fear 
of your own weakness, lest you should suffer 
another fall, revenge—or punishment of yourself 
for the wrong done. 

Having now considered Contrition or sorrow for 
sin, we may think of that second element in Repent¬ 
ance :—A Purpose of Amendment. 


20 


TRUE REPENTANCE. 


No man can fall into sin without the consent of 
his will, and no man can arise and shake off his 
guilt without an effort of his will. Sin goes through 
three stages. First comes the thought or sugges¬ 
tion of evil, and there is no sin to the conscience 
in hearing the suggestion, and having the thought. 
The second stage is the consenting of the will to 
the evil suggestion, and then, then sin begins to 
hatch. Lastly comes the evil act which is the 
accomplishment of the suggestion. Now there is 
so much evil in the world, and we cannot avoid the 
knowledge of it. We cannot escape the temptation 
of the devil, we cannot shut our ears to the sug¬ 
gestions of evil. But the thought and the sugges¬ 
tion do no harm, unless received and consented to. 
Just as the will converts the temptation into sin, so 
does the will convert sorrow for sin into resolution 
of amendment. If you would know whether your 
repentance has been sincere, find out if you have 
reached the firm resolve not to do that sin again. 
You must avoid the occasion which led you into 
wrong, and so you can show God that your pro¬ 
fession of penitence is sincere. You will break 
away from whatever is sinful in your past, and 
you will seek to please God for all the future if 
your repentance is sincere. 

And nov) we consider the third part of repentance 
which is the Confession of sin. When a child has 
done that which is wrong—you expect the child to 
come and say “Father, I have done that which you 
forbade me to do. I am sorry, and I will not do 
it again.” In that little sentence you have all the 



TRUE REPENTANCE. 


21 


elements of true Repentance. The child acknowl¬ 
edges its disobedience, exhibits sincere sorrow, and 
forms a resolution to be more careful for the future. 
We are God’s children, He is our Heavenly Father, 
and He expects of us what we demand of our chil¬ 
dren. He requires of us sorrow for having offended 
Him, a determination to keep from sin for the fu¬ 
ture, and an acknowledgment of our transgression. 

The great reason why God requires this acknowl¬ 
edgment from sinners is in order to bring them to 
a sense of their real condition. “ If we say we have 
no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in 
us; but if we confess our sins, He is faithful and 
just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from 
all unrighteousness.” 

When the Lord Jesus was setting before His 
Church an example of the perfect restoration of a 
sinner, He spoke the parable of the Prodigal Son. 
How this son had erred and strayed like a lost 
sheep. He had spent his father’s goods in riotous 
living. At last he entered into himself, and consid¬ 
ered how great his transgression was. Then he 
said, “ I will arise, and go to my father, and will 
say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, 
and before thee, and am no more worthy to be 
called thy son.” Here you see his true repentance. 
He grieves over his transgressions, he feels his own 
unworthiness, he makes what reparation he can, by 
leaving his old life and returning to his father, and, 
not content with that, he makes formal confession 
to his father of his misdeeds. 

As God called Adam to a formal act of confes- 


22 


TRUE REPENTANCE. 


sion, as the Prodigal Son is set before us as only 
obtaining pardon when he had confessed his sins, 
as David was called to confession as well as to sor¬ 
row and amendment of life—so is it still. God ex¬ 
pects us to go down on our knees before Him and 
make a plain confession, an acknowledgment of our 
sins unto Him. God is calling us all to Kepentance. 
We must not stop with merely thinking that we 
have done wrong, but we must be sincerely sorry 
for the sins of which we have been guilty. We 
must not regard it as inevitable that we give way 
to sin, nor put our hearts upon evil things. We 
should have a strong desire to amend our lives and 
to love that which will please God. We must tell 
Him so. Tell Him that we are sorry for the past 
and that we desire to live better lives in the future, 
and then seek His mercy and His grace in the name 
of the Great Sin Bearer. 


III. 


Friday—The Third Day of Lent. 

The Use and Benefit of Fasting . 1 

“ The days will come when the Bridegroom shall be taken away 
from them, and then shall they fast.” — St. Luke v. 35. 

How shall I keep this Lenten season ? How can 
I keep it in my circumstances, consistently with my 
line of daily duty ? How should I keep it, so that 
the effect shall be most thorough in elevating and 
purifying my personal life and character ? These 
are questions which we must take up at the outset, 
and a well-considered answer to which must lay the 
foundation for any real progress that we may hope 
for in the course of this solemn season. 

Without attempting here to discuss specific plans, 
which must be determined by regard to each one’s 
particular circumstances and personal needs, I de¬ 
sire to call your attention to one religious practice 
which stands out above all others as the duty of the 
season, and which the Church has unmistakably 
marked as such ; but which is very apt, in our time, 
to be counted as altogether obsolete, and entirely 
disused, or else relegated to the observance of a 
mere sentimental piety. I mean the Duty of Fast¬ 
ing. 

1 From a sermon by the late Rev. Jas. Mulchahey, S. T. D., St. Paul’s 
Chapel, Trinity Parish, New York. 


23 


24 THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING. 


It may be worth while for us to consider some 
of the reasons which have led good men and women 
in past ages to think that they were spiritually 
strengthened by physical, devotional fasting, and 
to ask if there is not something in these reasons to 
give them weight and profitable application in our 
own case ? 

Let it be clearly noted that no one ever supposed 
that the mere act of abstaining from food was, in 
itself, a religious duty. Abstinence of necessity was 
always counted as simply starvation, as utterly de¬ 
void of religious effect or purpose as of physical 
comfort. So, fasting which consisted merely of 
such abstinence, has never been supposed to have 
the least spiritual efficacy. Keally, to fast has al¬ 
ways been held by religious teachers to be, like get¬ 
ting down on the knees, profitable and right if done 
in connection with prayer, and for intensifying 
earnestness and humility therein ; but, otherwise, of 
no religious character whatever. The question, 
then, is always to be considered with this under¬ 
standing. Granting that sheer abstinence from 
food is not fasting religiously, why should fasting 
ever be considered a suitable accompaniment of 
prayer, or supposed to be conducive to its deeper 
earnestness or more fervent character ? 

Now, in giving what I take to be the true answer 
to this question, let us begin by putting the matter 
on the lowest ground. I suppose that there is no 
one who is really in earnest in the spiritual life who 
will not admit his conscious need of some test of his 
earnestness. 


THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING. 25 

The New Testament is full of passages which 
assert plainly and unequivocally that self-denial, in 
some form, is an essential element in the Christian 
life; and it is impossible to explain away these 
passages by referring them merely to the circum¬ 
stantial conditions of that, or any other age of the 
past. They are, unquestionably, declarations for 
all time and applicable in every stage of civiliza¬ 
tion and to every person, of whatsoever rank or 
calling. 

Now, this being true, it must be a question for 
anxious consideration with every one who is really 
conscientious, if there be any sort of test by which 
he can prove to himself that his religion is not a 
mere form or compliance with the conventional 
proprieties of respectable and well-behaved society. 
And, for this purpose, there is no test so practical 
as that which is afforded by every call of the 
Church to acts which are disagreeable and requiring 
self-denial. 

Among methods of self-denial, there is no one 
that is so readily attainable and so generally pos¬ 
sible as that of adopting some systematic plan, in 
which, from time to time and according to the 
recognized authority and wisdom of the Church, 
one puts himself upon fare that is less luxurious 
and abundant, less palatable and pleasing, and even 
harder and coarser, than his common regimen. It 
is a form of self denial which is possible for all , the 
rich and the poor alike; for luxury is relative, and 
the cheap indulgence of the very poorest has in it 
the same flavor of luxurious enjoyment that is found 


26 THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING. 


in the costly extravagance of the rich. Each must 
fast in the way which his own circumstances sug¬ 
gest ; and the ways will indeed be widely different; 
but the self-denial, which is the essence of fasting, 
is as possible for the one as for the other. 

But this is putting religious fasting only, as we 
have said, on the lowest ground. There is another 
reason for it, which is a little higher, viz : it is, at 
least when practiced systematically and in accord¬ 
ance with the regulations of the Church, a testi¬ 
mony to the world of our Christian allegiance. 

If Christianity is to be a really effective powbr, 
moving on society and lifting it upward constantly 
toward a higher spiritual plane, it must be known 
and recognized as having a positive character ; and 
its faithful disciples must have some distinguishing 
marks, by which they are known as “ a separate 
and peculiar people,” “ in the world, but not of the 
world.” But, open separation being now, as we 
have said, impracticable, and a separation by formal 
marks, as, for instance, by a particular style of 
dress or of speech, having been tried and found 
wanting, the true secret of such influence seems 
clearly to lie in a faithful conformity to the ap¬ 
pointments and directions of the Church, which 
have borne the test of many ages, and been found, 
in the experience of millions of saintly men and 
women, to be most effectual in giving tone and 
character to the spiritual life. 

The considerations that we have now taken into 
account would be applicable to any form of self- 
denial or self-discipline which might be sanctioned 


THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING. 27 

by the Church ; but there is much more to be said, 
and more that is positively and distinctively Chris¬ 
tian, in recommending the particular form of self- 
denial, which is, properly, fasting. 

It is a fact, as remarkable as it is unquestionable, 
that, in all ages and under all dispensations, they 
who have been eminent as saints of God have been 
known as serving Him “ with prayer and fasting ; ” 
and this fact is alone sufficient to indicate that 
there must be apparent to persons who are really 
spiritually minded, some special fitness in this par¬ 
ticular form of self-denial, as well as, in their 
experience, some proved use and efficacy for self- 
discipline and purification. Unquestionably, this is 
true. And the key to it may be found in the fact 
that in devotional abstinence from food there is 
a special recognition of the original source of sin in 
the world . Kenovation, or even reformation, must 
begin with a humble recognition of its need in the 
fallen condition of our natural state and character; 
and the same divine revelation which has brought 
us the knowledge of salvation, has taught us that 
sin came originally through yielding to fleshly 
appetite. What more obviously fit, then, whether 
it be in prostrate self-abasement, or for needful 
self-discipline, or as seeking for a personal partici¬ 
pation in the counteracting efficacy of the divine 
redemption; what, I ask, more obviously fit than 
the religious-minded curbing of our fleshly appetite , 
and our proved mastery over it by occasional 
denials of even its guiltless gratification ? This is, 
no doubt, the key to the general adoption of fasting 


28 THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING. 

in the devotional habits of the most earnest and 
successful seekers after holiness. 

Accordingly, in adopting this practice for our¬ 
selves, we have the advantage of knowing and feel¬ 
ing that we are in their company; our spirit is 
attuned in unison with theirs; we are consciously 
trying to be, and in our measure feel that we are, 
like minded with them, and we gain supplies of 
spiritual strength in this saintly communion. 

Each one must determine for himself how, in his 
circumstances and for his individual needs, he can 
fast most profitably; whether it be by entire 
abstinence for the whole or a part of given days, or 
simply by cutting off indulgence in some particular 
for which he has a special liking. He who pro¬ 
nounced a blessing upon the gift of a cup of cold 
water to a disciple in His name, will also bless any 
act of sincere self-denial practiced in memory of 
Him. Only let us not mock God, let us deny our¬ 
selves in something which is to us really self- 
denial ; let us, in whatever degree we may be able 
to bear it without diminishing our own usefulness 
by injuring our own health, put ourselves to some 
inconvenience, in sorrow and shame for those sins, 
“ the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the 
pride of life,” which made our Saviour a man of 
sorrows, and exposed Him to shame. 


Saturday—The Fourth Day of Lent. 

The Temptation of Our Lord . 1 

“ Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit to be tempted of the devil.”— 
St. Matt. iv. i. 

In the Gospel which is read on the first Sunday 
in Lent there is an account of the fasting and the 
temptation of our Lord. 

We do not know how many temptations there 
were, nor can we explain fully the nature and the 
circumstances of each. There are three tempta¬ 
tions narrated:—First, that He should turn the 
stones into bread to relieve His hunger; Second, 
that He should cast Himself down from the temple; 
and Third, that He should worship the evil one. 

Consider the reality of this struggle. The best 
expression to represent the attitude of our Lord to 
temptation is “ He was able not to sin.” He stood 
out against it. He fought it. He conquered it. 
But the struggle was real. It cost Him self-denial 
and suffering. There must be conflict. Success 
could not be gained otherwise. Having become 
the partaker of our human nature, the lower was 
pitted against the higher, and there was antago- 

1 Adapted from some Lenten addresses delivered by the Rev. A. H. 
Browne, LL. D., Canon of the Cathedral of Newfoundland. Pub¬ 
lished by Longmans & Co. in « Wearied with the Burden.” 

29 


30 THE TEMPTATION OF OUR LORD. 

nism between the promptings of good and the 
promptings of evil. He suffered being tempted. 
The struggle was real. 

1. These recorded temptations may be regarded 
as types of those which may assail us so that they 
become warnings against self-indulgence, against 
presumption and against ambition. 

Thinking of His being unwilling to turn the 
stones into bread we must remember that His long¬ 
ing for food was at least as great as our longing 
might be after the strain of such a fast; and to 
this was superadded the knowledge, to which the 
devil so craftily appeals, that He is able at a word 
to turn the stones of the wilderness into the bread 
which He craves to satisfy His hunger. His fast, 
His overcoming of desire, even of natural desire, 
teach us to do battle in our own lives against the 
sin of self-indulgence. 

It has been said with some satire, but with much 
truth, that we all worship a god whose name is 
“Comfort.” And even religious people will find 
many excuses which (as they think) justify them in 
their objection to any forms of mortification and 
restraint. 

But for our own souls’ sake, let us war against 
self-indulgence. If there were no other reason for 
welcoming and keeping Lent, this, I think, would 
be sufficient—that, if we learn to give up this thing, 
however innocent, or to do without that thing, 
however well we can afford it, we are learning to 
keep our wayward wills in check, we are, by God’s 
grace, trying to subdue the flesh to the spirit. 


THE TEMPTATION OF OUR LORD. 


31 


And, above all, the conquest of self brings us 
near to our Saviour. “ Christ pleased not Himself.” 
It is not the crucifix or the book of devotion in the 
oratory, that may most truly conform us to His 
image, but the daily, hourly sacrifice of self upon 
the secret altar of the soul. 

2. Again we are permitted to see the conflict of 
our blessed Lord with the powers of evil; and this 
time the temptation is to the sin of presumption. 
To quote the words of Dr. Edersheim, “ Jesus 
stands on the watch post of the temple, which the 
white-robed priest has just quitted. Fast the rosy 
morning light, deepening into crimson, and edged 
with gold, is spreading over the land. . . . The 

massive temple gates are slowly opening, and the 
blast of the priests’ silver trumpets is summoning 
Israel to begin a new day of appearing before their 
Lord. How then let Him descend, Heaven-borne 
into the midst of the priests and people. What 
shouts of acclamation would greet His appearance! 
What homage and worship would be His ! . . . 

Jesus had overcome in the first temptation by 
simple, absolute trust. This was the time and this 
the place to act upon this trust, even as the very 
Scriptures warranted. But so to have done would 
have been not trust—far less the heroism of faith— 
but presumption .” 

It is presumption if we knowingly put ourselves 
in bodily or spiritual peril, trusting to the mercy 
and Providence of God. We recognize this, at 
least as a rule, with reference to our bodies; we 
say that no man is justified in neglecting the ordi- 


32 THE TEMPTATION OF OUR LORD. 

nary laws of health, even in the interests of a good 
cause. Most people are quite ready to stay away 
from church if they are over-tired or if the weather 
is unusually bad ! But do we apply the same prin¬ 
ciple to our spiritual life? “Lead us not into 
temptation ”—but there are times when we almost 
seem to be glad to put ourselves in the way of 
being tempted, when we are ready to go into places 
and to undertake employments which are, to say 
the least, dangerous and full of peril to those who 
would live the guided life. And the result is that 
we fall. Satan has tempted us to be too rash—to 
be too presumptuous. We may not rely upon the 
Divine promises unless we keep the Divine com¬ 
mands. 

Once more, that is terrible presumption which 
thinks that it may leave all that concerns the eter¬ 
nal world to the “ evil days ” of old age or to what 
is called a deathbed repentance. “ To live ill, but 
to hope to die well,” is to tempt God. 

And if, in God’s mercy, our souls have been saved 
from so terrible a danger as this, yet does not Lent 
remind us that there are many bad habits still un¬ 
checked, many good resolutions still unfilled, and 
that we have put off the “ working out of our sal¬ 
vation ” because we think that there is yet time; 
or, it may be, that we have some sin which we have 
never truly sought grace to conquer, because we 
have thought that it was but a little thing, and that 
God was very merciful ? 

3. Consider now the temptation to worship 
Satan. What is the sin which He resists, and by 


THE TEMPTATION OF OUR LORD. 33 

His holy example teaches us to resist, when He re¬ 
fuses to commit even a momentary act of treachery 
to His Father by bowing down to Satan, although 
the prize might be all the fair kingdoms of the 
mighty world ? It is the sin of ambition. 

For what was He longing to do ? Had He not 
come down from highest heaven to set up a king¬ 
dom of regenerated humanity ? If the evil one 
yielded then would not all things be possible now 
—a world where all men shall love God, and shall 
acknowledge God as their King ? Satan offers to 
yield all this at once. Yonder tramp of armed 
Home, changed into the strength of men who use 
their strength for righteousness; that hungering 
cry of the old wisdom satisfied at last; those ships 
that dot the Mediterranean messengers of peace 
and love rather than of war or of selfishness: this 
old Jerusalem in very truest sense the city of God’s 
peace. It is the appeal to the Messiah—to Him 
who thirsts for the souls of men—“ all these things 
will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and wor¬ 
ship me.” 

Is ambition always a fault f Surely not, we say. 
There may be a generous impulse toward excellence 
which dignifies and ennobles those who cherish it. 
Yet if we think of the word ambition in its origi¬ 
nal meaning as a going round about, a facing both 
ways to gain our end by any means, however un¬ 
worthy—then we see that such ambition is indeed 
a very serious fault. 

For ambition in this case means impatience with 
God’s ordering of our lives. This is the form in 


34 THE TEMPTATION OE OUR LORD. 

which it is presented to our blessed Saviour—He is 
asked to take into His own hands “ the work which 
His Father has given Him to do.” And He sees 
that to do this is to worship another rather than 
God—“ Him only shalt Thou serve.” 

There is always some point to be yielded for any 
seeming advantage that the temptations of the 
world may offer us. Some of you know Edwin 
Long’s picture of “ Diana or Christ.” Only a few 
grains of incense thrown on the altar-fires, and 
then life, love, riches! The alternative may not be 
put before us quite so openly or plainly; yet there 
it is:—“ If Thou wilt fall down and worship me ”— 
Give up something, the world says: It is nothing, 
it is of no consequence; if it be evil, do this little 
evil that so much good may come. Think how use¬ 
ful you may be in other ways, it urges, if you will 
only give up this one little prejudice that makes 
you so singular, and that keeps you from so much 
that you would like! 

He who knows and who loves us appoints our 
path: “ Order my steps in Thy word, and so shall 

no wickedness have dominion over me.” 


V. 


Second Week—Monday—The Fifth Day of 
Lent. 

The Spiritual Life. 1 

" God is a Spirit. . . .”— St. John iv. 24. 

“ There is a spirit in man.”—J ob xxxii. 8. 

What is spirituality of character? How are we 
to know it by sight ? How may it be nourished ? 
In answering these questions we are not left with¬ 
out guidance, and guidance we greatly need, for 
spirituality is a thing that has its counterfeits. The 
true criteria of the spiritual life are to be looked 
for in those passages of Holy Scripture in which 
the fruits of the Spirit are enumerated. 

Let us consider for a few moments what spiritu¬ 
ality of character is not . There are phases of char¬ 
acter which sometimes pass for spirituality, but 
which do not really deserve that name, nay, more 
which serve to bring that name into disrespect. 

1. Professing no interest in the affairs of this 
world, utter indifference to the great movements 
that are going on among men, the strifes of na¬ 
tions, the conflicts of Churches, the migrations of 
races, the growths of new modes of thought, the 

1 From a sermon by Rev. W. R. Huntington, D. D., Rector of 
Grace Church, New York. From “The Causes of the Soul” pub¬ 
lished by E. P. Dutton & Company, New York. 


35 


36 


THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 


progress of learning, I say indifference to all these 
things is sometimes thought to be a sign of spiritu¬ 
ality of character. I have known of religious 
persons who made it a point of conscience not to 
keep themselves informed upon the current affairs 
of the day, for fear of losing spirituality. But 
surely this is a misconception of the nature of the 
spiritual life. Fervency of spirit may consist with 
diligence in business, and if we do not see the two 
things frequently combined, that is not because they 
cannot be combined ; there is no necessary want of 
harmony between them. The depth of our interest 
in things unseen is not to be accurately gauged by 
our indifference to things seen. 

2. Again, spirituality of character does not con¬ 
sist in the habitual use of a stated religious vocabu¬ 
lary. We are not to suppose that only those are 
truly spiritually minded who are accustomed to ex¬ 
press themselves in a phraseology peculiar to this 
or that school of devotional thought. Spirituality 
is not a thing that can be tied to any one form of 
words or set of expressions. 

3. Once more, spirituality is not to be accurately 
measured by severity of disposition. Sternness is 
not a necessary accompaniment of sanctity. It is, 
indeed, hard to associate boisterousness and jovi¬ 
ality with the spiritual mind, but cheerfulness, 
surely, and a sunny temper are perfectly compati¬ 
ble with it. The distinctions of popular speech are 
seldom meaningless, and the fact that we have the 
two words, sanctity and sanctimony, would seem to 
be evidence that there is a difference between the 


THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 


37 


two things. Sanctimony is that aping of sanctity 
which counts upon a show of austereness to serve 
as the cloak of its disguise. Severity of disposition 
may be allied with profound spirituality, but we 
are not to suppose that it is essential to the being 
of it. 

What then are the characteristics of the truly 
spiritual mind ? If indifference to things outward 
and visible be no test, if the use of a special phrase¬ 
ology be no test, if severity of manner, the stern, 
unyielding temper be no test, where are we to look 
for criteria , how are we to distinguish between the 
true coin and the counterfeit ? 

Suppose we make genuine spirituality to lie in 
heartfelt reverence toward God , and consistent unself¬ 
ishness in our dealings with our fellow-men. By rev¬ 
erence toward God I mean that habitual sense of the 
near presence of the Father of spirits, which seems 
so to accompany some men as to throw a sort of 
atmosphere about them, the influence of which we 
feel the moment we enter it. There are precious 
stones, the amethyst is one, in which the coloring 
matter is so delicate that the most careful chemical 
analysis fails to ascertain either the quality or the 
quantity of it. And yet this subtle, impalpable 
something, by its presence there in the crystal, 
makes all the difference between worthlessness and 
worth. So it is with this characteristic we are 
talking about. We may not be able to say what it 
is about a reverential man that makes him seem to 
us to carry about with him the presence and some¬ 
thing of the power of God; it is not wholly in his 


38 


THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 


words, it is not wholly in his expression of counte¬ 
nance, it is not wholly in any one thing that he 
does; but somehow it is there, and we feel it. 
What is the secret of acquiring this unearthly 
power ? It lies, so those who have the best right 
to say tell us, it lies in being much with God, in 
holding frequent communication with Him. We 
cannot be a great deal in the presence of a fellow- 
creature without catching unconsciously more or 
less of his “ tone.” Even so, to be often holding 
intercourse with Him who is a Spirit must impart 
to the spirit which is in man a something not its 
own. 

We need in our religion more of this element of 
reverence. It cannot be that we should talk so 
flippantly as we are wont to do of the Most High 
God, it cannot be that we should use so lightly His 
name, His word, His worship, if we were, as we 
ought to be, alive to His presence, conscious of His 
continual judgment. We shall find, I think, if we 
study the characters of holy men, that whatever 
their differences of theological belief, they all pos¬ 
sessed in common this intense consciousness of 
God’s nearness, this habitual reverence for Him as 
a present Sovereign. If we would acquire spiritu¬ 
ality it behooves us to remember to look up. 

But not up, only, we must look around as well. 
God has knit us together in the fellowship of a 
common humanity, and to forget one another in 
our endeavors after spiritual achievement is hope¬ 
lessly to defeat our own object. Hence I made un¬ 
selfishness the second characteristic of the genuine 


THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 


39 


spirituality. It is easy to make a luxury of reli¬ 
gion, to pursue it as a fine art, but to carry it into 
our homes, to make it serve us in the thousand and 
one vexations and temptations that spring out of 
our daily intercourse with the world is not so easy. 
But if we look carefully at that bright catalogue of 
graces in which St. Paul enumerates the fruits of 
the Spirit, we shall find that they are all of them 
reducible under the one common head of unselfish¬ 
ness. 

It is by dint of the homely virtues, and through 
their patient exercise among inconspicuous scenes, 
that saintly lives are fashioned. God grant that 
before the end comes we may have acquired the 
spiritual mind. 


VI. 

Second Week—Tuesday—the Sixth Day of Lent. 

We Find Ourselves in the Scriptures. 1 

“ For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our 
learning, that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, 
might have hope.”— Rom. xv. 4. 

This is a text which it is refreshing to recall 
whenever we have been harried by the worries of 
criticism, with the wrangles over Old Testament 
records. After all, let the dates and the authors be 
what and who they may, let the process by which 
the materials came together be long or short, simple 
or complicated, discoverable or undiscoverable, there 
at last the record stands, there at last the Book lies 
open before us, and the clear purpose which has 
brought it together is as manifest and certain as 
ever. It is the record of the spiritual experiences 
of a race , experiences unique and prolonged and 
manifold and momentous, experiences which em¬ 
body and disclose the ways by which God has 
worked in the world, the methods by which He has 
drawn men near to Him, the discipline under which 
He has trained and purged and uplifted them. 
Through varied periods, under infinite variety of 
circumstance, still He pursued His design with them, 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. H. Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul’s 
Cathedral, London, England. 

40 


WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE SCRIPTURES. 41 


till they came to a clearer understanding of that 
mind. Over two thousand years of historical de¬ 
velopment carried on the continuous tale, and now, 
collected, sifted, amalgamated, there the entire 
story lies. Unknown hands, it is true, have worked 
at it, unremembered lives have uttered themselves 
through it, but all witness to the will, the character, 
the intention with which God Almighty deals with 
men’s souls and bodies; and since He is the Eternal 
God who changeth not, it reveals for all time and 
to all people what is His perpetual mode of treat¬ 
ment , His rule of conduct , His moral characteristics , 
His Fatherly handling , His way of bringing out 
judgment into victory. Therefore all these things 
are significant for us to-day, they reveal how that 
eternal God will prove Himself to be the same to us 
as to men of old time who served and trusted Him 
then. He never failed them, He will never fail us : 
that is the sure moral. These experiences of theirs 
“ are written for our learning, that we, through pa¬ 
tience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have 
hope.” With that end in view, we see no critical 
questions intervene. Profoundly interesting as they 
are in themselves, they nevertheless leave us per¬ 
fectly free to turn to the Old Testament with un¬ 
shaken confidence that we may learn from its com¬ 
fort and its patience how to retain our hope. 

And our first instinct is perfectly natural and is 
right. It is to find in it the interpretation—God’s 
own interpretation of our inner personal experi¬ 
ences. We jmd ourselves everywhere in it / all is 
for us—all those old lives, lived so long ago, serve 


42 WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE SCRIPTURES. 

to explain us to ourselves. They develop our in¬ 
stincts, they utter our aspirations. What we dumbly 
feel they express, what bewilders us becomes clear 
to them. They repeat our fears, our lapses, our 
falls, our recoveries; they rehearse our panic, and 
our penitence, and our praises. It is self-revelation ; 
every hidden secret of our being is dragged up 
there into the daylight. No book ever showed us 
like this Book what we are, what it is in us to be, 
the height of holiness to which we might be drawn, 
the depth of shame into which we are ever prone 
to fall. We start as we read like guilty things sur¬ 
prised. Who would have dreamed that we were 
seen through and through by eyes that pierce the 
quick ? Here it all is, my sin, my disgrace, my self- 
deceit, my stupid, stubborn rebellion, Who has told 
of me? And the Voice also of God which assisted 
me, and convinced me, and converted me, and broke 
me, the Voice that suddenly drove it upon my soul, 
“ Thou art the man ”—how did that strange Book 
ever hear of it and write it down—my own private 
secret of secrets, which I could not bear to tell to 
my dearest friend! And the long-suffering mercies 
of my God, and the boon of His pardon, and the 
longings that I have had to stand before Him for¬ 
given, white as snow, longings that have been in 
me just when people would have least believed it, 
just at hours when it would have sounded most in¬ 
credible ! Here they all are, and other men have 
known them all, and have carried them further, and 
have gone lower than I, and have mounted far 
higher. I miss nothing here of all that I have ever 


WE ElND O EES ELVES IN THE SCRIPTURES. 43 

felt. So the Book draws me, so it persuades me. 
All is written for my learning of myself ; that is 
the first evidence to me of its inspiration. God 
takes me by the hand and leads me along the whole 
story from end to end. He is a living God who 
knows me utterly as I am, forever His finger points 
from page to page, and ever as He points we hear a 
voice saying, “ Is it not true, true of you ? ” as of 
him or of her of whom it was told, “ Thou art the 
man ; here is thy sin, and here is the way out of 
thy sin.” Look and read, and mark, and learn! It 
is the story of thine own soul and I, thy God, am 
the same yesterday, to-day and forever: as I was 
with them of old, so also I will be with thee. 

Take the Book, and so read it with God at our 
side, and its truth smites in upon us. From end to 
end you can verify it all. There is Eve in the gar¬ 
den, the most wonderful, the most unanswerable 
chapter ever written. Till the crack of doom that 
record will hold its own. Every soul that has 
ever sinned will put its seal to it that that is true ; 
that is the precise way in which sin comes about. 
Its entire secret has been read; it is stripped of 
all disguise; in all its infinite varieties it does 
but repeat that one immutable type, it does but re¬ 
iterate the old, old story by which innocence first 
passed into guilt, the serpent in the grass, and the 
creeping whisper coming we know not whence, and 
the dreamy pause that lingers over the thing for¬ 
bidden, and the momentary indecision, and the 
subtle question that remains unanswered—though 
enough that it should be asked, it needs no answer 


44 WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE SCRIPTURES. 

—“ Hath God said ? ” and the absurd smallness of 
the immediate provocation and yet the immense 
issue involved; merely fruit on a tree and all 
knowledge of good and evil to be gained, and the 
sudden lapse of the will, and the hand that has 
been put out all but unconsciously, and the mouth 
that has eaten before it is aware, and the quiet that 
follows the act as if nothing had happened at all. 

And then the sudden reverse, and the lighting of 
judgment, and the rush of shame, and the abject 
confession, and the irrevocable doom! Who has 
not known it all ? It is I who feel God draw nearer 
in the cool of the evening; it is I who fly to hide 
myself behind the trees of the Garden, my own 
heart that is laid bare as with a knife! 

All these things were written, surely, for our 
learning. One after another they speak to me. 
I am a child of faithful Abraham, a child of the 
Promise, justified by faith, and a strange impulse 
discovers me as I live and move among my fellows, 
as it found him hidden in IJr of the Chaldees, and 
from that hour old habitual ways cease to satisfy, 
and a dim want sends me out seeking, and slowly 
this is met by a Voice that calls me by my name, 
and I move under covenanted guidance, and a mys¬ 
terious intimacy goes forward—God is my friend, 
and visions greet me by the way, and then long, 
dull lapses recur, and again the call is given, and I 
rise and receive the pledge, and at Bethel I set up 
a stone, and at Mamre I am brought face to face 
with my God. And now again I look up, and at 
my tent-door the angels stand, and I run and bow 


WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE SCRIPTURES. 45 

myself to the ground, and the incredible vow is 
made. And if I stagger not, if I cling to that 
deathless hope when God seems to shatter His own 
Word and to recall the promise He had sworn to 
make good, if I still go on and ask nothing, and 
only believe, some angel will intervene, and at the 
last moment God will find Himself a way; still my 
faith, though it blunder, will be counted unto me 
for righteousness. 

And Jacob in his lying, in his fear, in his flight, 
in his sudden insight, in his gradual purification, in 
his final wrestle—surely it is my own mean world¬ 
liness, my own self-seeking in all spiritual things 
that is laid bare. I know it—that selfishness in 
things of God, that snatching at my own spiritual 
advantage; I know it all—that long fight with the 
mean, low-minded motive, the fight that must come 
at last, so fierce a fight, of which, even if by God’s 
mercy I prevail, I bear the scar until I die. And 
Esau—the headstrong heedlessness of a loose youth, 
heady, wilful, unprofitable, unstable as water that 
cannot excel. Or Joseph, the man with the irresist¬ 
ible force and capacity of goodness that can turn 
all misfortune to good—how potent and personal is 
the story. If only I could trust in sheer goodness 
of heart as he! And David, the strong, radiant, 
beautiful soul, so pathetic in his passionate love, so 
deeply stained, yet so utterly true at the heart of 
his manhood. And Solomon, with the golden 
promise of glorious gifts on whom the world’s 
breath falls, and the fine gold becomes dim, and the 
touch of degradation soils and spoils—all written 


46 WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE SCRIPTURES. 

for my learning! And all the crowding cries of 
the Psalmist, voices of anxiety, of pain, of relief, of 
loyalty, of courage, and disgrace, and forgiveness, 
sent up out of unremembered perils and forgotten 
sorrows, from wild hills of Moreb and waste places 
in the wilderness and the Jordan, from dreary exiles 
under the willows of Babylon, the sighs of those 
who find no comfort! Or again, the cries of the 
redeemed, and of those who know of Zion, and tell 
her towers and mark her palaces—all ours, our se¬ 
crets that are read, our thirsting souls that drink, 
our hunger, and needs, and appeals, and complaints, 
and passions, and prayers, and hopes, and fears, and 
temptations, and exultations, all recognized and 
sanctioned and interpreted! It is as if tongues of 
fire sat on every head. So our whole being is made 
alive with speech, we all become one cry; every 
feeling and impulse allowed for and understood, 
even as by penitence all of every race, whether 
Parthians, Medes, or dwellers in Mesopotamia, 
Greeks and Ethiopians, each hears in his own tongue 
the marvelous works of God. That is the primary 
use of the Bible as it first takes hold of us. And 
so far our task, our duty, is quite simple: it is to 
surrender to its influence, to learn its great language, 
to take its words upon our lips, to form our lives to 
its long and varied utterance, to follow its counsels, 
to absorb its temper, to identify ourselves with its 
records, to acquire its confidence, to walk in its 
faith in all dark days when we can see no light. 


VII. 


Second Week—Wednesday—the Seventh day 
of Lent. 

We find Christ in the Scriptures . 1 

“ For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our 
learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures 
might have hope.”— Rom. xv. 4. 

The Bible is not only a bead-roll of faith, not 
only a record of heroic testimony, a treasury of 
splendid experience, but it is also a unity, a single 
Booh, a single, supreme, consistent, continuous ac¬ 
tion . From end to end it says one thing and one 
only; it recalls one single event! What is that ? 
We know it well! By St. Paul’s own special title 
it is called the mystery, the open secret, the divine 
act of revelation, the thing that God was always 
doing under cover as hidden leaven, yet preparing 
to be disclosed—the thing that was prepared from 
the foundation of the world, and that was at last 
done at the one fit moment, at the time and at the 
spot made ready according to the end decreed—the 
Mystery: Jesus Christ, the Hope of Glory. From 
cover to cover the Booh is full of Him and of Him 
only, one mind felt in it everywhere, one spirit 
quickening it, one Face looking out. He weeps 

1 From a sermon by Rev. H. Scott Holland, Canon of St. Paul’s 
Cathedral, London, England. 


47 


48 WE FIND CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES. 


with all who weep, He suffers with all who suffer, 
He rejoices with all who rejoice. He it is who de¬ 
termines the shape of the entire material; toward 
Him it is directed; for His purposes it is distributed; 
by relation to His arrival, its relative importance is 
to be estimated; He is the standard of its worth 
throughout; He is the sole measure of its truth. 
He gives to the whole varied mass, coherence and 
growth and vitality. Without Him it would have 
no principle to combine its details, to fertilize them, 
to transmute them. In Him they stand together, 
they move under control, as the body is possessed 
by the spirit; it reveals the same life everywhere. 

Strange, this outlook! Each little human life 
of this or that saint, of sufferer or sinner, in itself 
so full of living interest, disclosing God’s dealings 
with this soul or with that, who came and went 
and was laid with his fathers, and fell asleep as if 
that was the complete and rounded story; in 
reality, each such life had been moving within a 
larger and enduring purpose; each had been in the 
grasp of a Master Hand, unknown to itself, and 
had been brought into the service of a scheme that 
it could not measure or devise. Far from being 
rounded in itself, it had been thrown in simply to 
add a touch here and there to a great ideal, which 
was always gathering to itself strength, thrown in 
to illustrate this or that fragment of an Eternal 
counsel, to be one tiny stone in a mystical building, 
one strand of tapestry woven with the Divine 
Power to portray the Christ! Each whole story 
is as but a chord that occurs in a prolonged musical 


WE FIND CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES. 49 

progression, which the composer arrives at, uses, 
and passes through to new developments and com¬ 
binations. Each life is a suggestion of a type , a 
prophecy; it points beyond itself; it is manipu¬ 
lated from elsewhere. We watch this spirit of God 
completing its designs as Ave might Avatch the 
fingers of the SAvift worker at the loom catching at 
this thread or at that; as it lies there in a tumbled 
heap before him, and passing it Avith skilled secu¬ 
rity into the texture of the Avoven web. So rapid, 
so unexpected his motions, yet lo, the steady pat¬ 
tern rises, and every act and choice he makes is 
justified as the process reveals the finished Avork. 
So Ave knoAV it is human material in the Bible 
stories, picked out, cut off, left, dropped, done with, 
sometimes a long continuous story, sometimes a 
stray isolated incident—Melchizedec or Cyrus, 
snatched up as it were from the darkness and then 
dropped; a king, noAV and then a child, some poor 
Avoman, some sufferer, each wanted for so long, for 
so much and for no more—just when needed, and 
then dropped and done with! Each no carved 
stone or thread, but a live human soul free and im- 
pulswe and yet acting under control, not like the 
mule driven by bit and bridle, but guided by the 
hand, each called and sent and used—recalcitrant 
as Pharaoh perhaps, unsteady as Esau, yet serving 
the one victorious purpose of Him whom nothing 
can baffle or escape or entangle or disappoint—this 
strong Potter Avho lays His hand upon the clay and 
moulds and bends it under the Avhirling wheel of 
Time. Nations and empires pass beneath His 


50 WE FIND CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES. 

sway, submissive as slaves that blindly toil: they 
may fail, they may sin, they may rebel, they may 
fall under judgment, and wrath—but still they 
must submit to the laws of the Mystery, still they 
contribute to the Eternal counsel, still the wrath 
will hold on its way toward one goal. So the 
kingdom is brought in and the day dawns, and the 
counsel of God fulfils itself. So from cover to 
cover the Bible records but one fact: it is a body 
possessed by a single dominant soul, and the Soul 
that possesses it is Jesus Christ. 

And, beloved, this truth about the Bible, that it 
is a revelation throughout of Jesus Christ, is inde¬ 
pendent, let us all repeat, of all the minutiae of 
criticism: it is itself the one supreme fact which it 
is the office of criticism to account for and to illu¬ 
minate. We believe in the Bible because we be¬ 
lieve in Jesus Christ, He being in Himself the sole 
interpretation to which the Bible submits. He is 
our Light by which we read it, He is our Touch¬ 
stone by which we test its value, and assort its ma¬ 
terial. Taking Him with us as a Living King 
whom we know for Himself and love and serve by 
direct personal experience of what His presence 
reveals Him to be, taking Him a Living King with 
us, we travel the whole varied ground of the old 
Scriptures, and through all He speaks to us. He 
is the Key we find to all its perplexities; He is the 
Harmony into which all its voices blend. He 
throws this or that into the background. He 
brings other parts forward to the front; His char¬ 
acter is the Bible's conscience. His life is the meas- 


WE FIND CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES. 51 


ure of its inspiration. And this prophetic cor¬ 
respondence, and coherence, and consistenc}^, by 
which He shows Himself to be the consummation 
of that toward which the entire movement of Israel 
had been directed is the fact on which we stand 
and which no historical examination of documents 
can touch or shake. If it were the product, not of 
a dozen well-known authors, but of a prolonged 
and undefined national movement, so much the 
more marvelous becomes the result that they all 
terminate in Jesus Christ. 

And, my brethren, as all these things were writ¬ 
ten aforetime for our learning, so it becomes us to 
learn from them the double lesson on which we have 
dwelt. The double lesson to be learned in its nat¬ 
ural sequence is firsts as we have ever said , God puts 
Himself at our service , all His resources minister 
to our needs. For us He works, for our comfort, for 
our patience, for our hope ; we individually are the 
centre of the action and God is teaching us how He 
will call, and watch, and guide, and solace, and 
feed, and forgive, and redeem ! And then our per¬ 
sonal experience of spiritual summons: Christ wash¬ 
ing our feet, all the abasement, the humiliation, the 
thanksgiving, the penitence, the praise ; we lift our 
hearts to the Lord. When that has been realized, 
when we have been strengthened and heartened, 
then an entirely new thing appears. Christ lifts 
Himself up from serving at our feet, He shows 
Himself risen as Christ the King, and as King it is 
He who is the centre, and we far away on the out¬ 
lying circumference; He who once ministered to 


52 WE FIND CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES. 

our needs now demands our service. It is not so 
much we who want Him as He who wants us. He 
is the supreme purpose of the Father, He, the one 
and only Presence, fills the entire horizon; He is 
the absolute consummation to whose necessities all 
must conform; He is the King and we are the 
kingdom, and the kingdom only exists in Him, in 
His breath, and in His will. Our one use is to ex¬ 
press Him, be His tool in His hand, to be the word 
of His mouth. He will give us our value, He will 
determine by His own standard our place, our 
motions, our activities, our rank, our prophetic oc¬ 
cupation, serving at His feet that we may be 
cleansed by the service of His royalty. Will God 
not help us as we sadly become aware, as we all 
must, of the fragmentary imperfection of human 
life—so little the things we do, so poor, and broken 
our work for Christ ? Circumstances hinder, and 
action forbids, and sickness curtails, and nothing is 
completed. Ho, nothing is completed ; Christ alone 
completes. We are the tiny fragments in the Eternal 
purpose which reaches out far beyond our range. 
Sometimes that purpose needs us in our activity, 
sometimes it wants us to stand aside and wait. We 
cannot tell, we cannot hope to be able to explain all 
that happens to us. Life in Christ’s great kingdom, 
life in the light of Eastertide will be more of a 
mystery than ever before, for it means that we have 
been caught up into a larger scheme, which spreads 
far away out of sight, out of our judgment. And 
how can we say when we are useful and when we 
are useless ? Be constant , let Him use you as He 


WE FIND CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES. 53 

will. Your little life, if it be but loyal in intention, 
has been caught up into the great Will of God, and 
fills a place in the Eternal kingdom. You cannot 
tell how or why. Enough that though you cannot 
see how or why, yet He who uses you as His in¬ 
strument is still the same who made Himself your 
servant and washed your feet. Surely you can 
trust Him when the same who watched and tended 
you now disposes of you in His good pleasure in 
ways that seem to you strange ? Be not afraid! 
Trust Him on and on. He knelt at your feet and 
now rules as your King. 


VIII. 


Second Week—Thursday—the Eighth Day of 
Lent. 

The Feeding of the Multitude . 1 

“ When Jesus then lifted up His eyes, and saw a great company 
come unto Him, He saith unto Philip, whence shall we buy bread, 
that these may eat? ” —St. John vi. 5. 

There have been teachers who have wanted to 
give mankind a lofty inspiration, but seemed not to 
care whether men were hungry and thirsty or not. 
On the other hand, there have been teachers who 
simply dedicated themselves to the lower wants of 
humanity. If they could see men well fed and 
well housed they did not ask themselves whether 
there was any higher food with which they ought 
to supply the souls of those whose bodies had now 
been satiated. The richness and completeness of 
the life of Jesus seems to me to be shown in this 
almost as much as in anything, that He cared for 
the wants of men from the topmost to the bottommost 
of men's lives. So, as Jesus looked into the faces 
of the people who had followed Him across the Sea 
of Tiberias, He saw their hunger there. He saw 
that there was something which their bodies needed. 
We are especially told that there was no wonder, 

1 From a sermon by the Right Rev. Phillips Brooks, D. D., late 
Bishop of Massachusetts. 

54 


THE FEEDIKH OF THE MULTITUDE. 55 

surprise or difficulty in the soul of Jesus Himself. 
He undertook to supply it. “ This He said to prove 
him (Philip), for He Himself knew what He would 
do.” But the disciple felt a wonder and a per¬ 
plexity. He said, “ Two hundred pennyworth of 
bread is not enough that ever}*- one of them may 
take a little.” Then another spoke and said: 
“ There is a lad here with five barley loaves and 
two small fishes, but what are they among so 
many ? ” Then Jesus, satisfied with that which 
they had, feeling capacity and power in Himself, 
bids the men sit down upon the grass, and proceeds 
to distribute to them that which seems so little, and 
to make it abundant for all their wants. The dis¬ 
ciples were full of wonder at that which seemed in¬ 
sufficient. Jesus, seeing the sufficiency, applied it 
so that it was indeed enough for all around Him. 

Is not the education of life under the training of 
Christ very largely this:—We mount up from pos¬ 
sibility to possibility and little by little come to 
see sufficiency where, we had seen entire insuffi¬ 
ciency. A few loaves and the small fishes become 
abundant when Jesus looks upon them and exer¬ 
cises His power upon their substance. 

A man finds himself to be in the midst of cer¬ 
tain circumstances, and when he hears any great 
exhortation from any fellow-man bidding him to 
live a noble life, or any prompting within the soul, 
he says, “It is impossible in these circumstances; 
it is impossible that these few loaves and fishes 
should feed my nature so that it shall grow into 
such completion as is called for.” So he sits down 


56 


THE FEEDING OF THE MULTITUDE. 


in his listlessness and is not able to understand that 
which Jesus by and by comes and tells him, the 
completeness of these circumstances, their sufficiency 
at any rate for greater things than he is asked to 
do. Jesus says: “ Let the men sit down. I will 
touch the loaves and fishes and they shall multiply 
before you. Only believe there is a greater possi¬ 
bility than you are able to see, and I will lead you 
forward to the realization of that possibility; and 
the little circumstances of your life shall unfold 
themselves and prove to be abundant accommoda¬ 
tion for a great and growing human soul.” As 
soon as the soul has come to feel that not it, but 
God, is the judge of the circumstances in which it 
is placed, that same change takes place which took 
place here. 

Are you and I, my friends, to judge of the cir¬ 
cumstances in which we are placed ? It is good 
for us that we should help our brethren to make 
the circumstances of their lives as much richer than 
they are now as we possibly can. It is good for us 
that we should try to improve our own circum¬ 
stances, and lift up our life so that we shall live 
among larger things, and that we should refuse to 
live among the lower things in which we find our¬ 
selves placed, so long as it is possible to live among 
higher things. But so far as we must live in the 
midst of difficult circumstances, let us feel that they 
are God’s circumstances and not ours, and let Him 
be the judge and not ourselves of what should come 
forth from them. 

There are souls mourning over their circum- 


THE FEEDING OF THE MULTITUDE. 57 

stances and saying: “If I only could be there 
where another sits in his richness and abundance 
of machinery and opportunity, then there would be 
something more for my soul.” The soul is taking 
its own judgment of its possibilities rather than 
taking God’s judgment. It is so much nobler to 
say: “ God set me here to be true and not false, 
brave and not cowardly ; it must be therefore pos¬ 
sible for me to bring out of these circumstances 
something that shall be real food and sustenance 
and means of growth for this soul which He has 
set here and which He has never forgotten.” 

There is also another thing. God teaches the soul 
not merely that it may he fed through its circum¬ 
stances ,, hut that it may he fed directly from Him 
in spite of its circumstances. There is an imme¬ 
diate relation of the soul to God, a personal supply 
coming from the Divine richness, something that 
can come down from God in spite of circumstances, 
if not through circumstances; that can make the 
soul to be fed and enlarged until it shall become 
what God intended it to be; what God bade it to 
be when He sent His Son into the world. God 
never would have called me to enter into a higher 
life if He had placed me in circumstances where it 
was impossible. Men living in circumstances which 
seem to imprison them and to give them no oppor¬ 
tunity to escape, men living in drudgery and pov¬ 
erty, seeming to have nothing to do but to earn 
their hard bread and water from day to day; again 
and again these men have found themselves, if 
they trusted in God and lifted their eyes above 


58 THE FEEDING OF THE MULTITUDE. 

their circumstances up to Him, have found their 
lives growing wise with a wisdom that has come to 
them in the midst of the poor things by which 
they were surrounded. They have found their 
souls at liberty, even in the midst of dungeons, 
and so have walked in spiritual pastures wide, and 
climbed mountain heights, while lingering in cells 
where they could scarcely stand upright. And so 
they have served their brethren as they went on in 
their pilgrimage of pain. 


IX. 

Second Week—Friday—the Ninth Day of Lent. 

What if We Turn Away From Christ ? 1 

“ Then Simon Peter answered Him, Lord, to whom shall we go ? 
Thou hast the words of eternal life.”— St. John vi. 68. 

If we are ever tempted to turn away from Christ 
we may safely challenge our tempters to show us 
anything better than His religion. They may 
make objections to what we hold, but after all we 
can defy them to show us a better way. 

Let us fancy for a moment that in an hour of 
weakness we have listened to the temptation to go 
away from Christ. In what respect then shall we 
find that we have increased our happiness or use¬ 
fulness ? What solid thing shall we get to replace 
what we have given up ? 

Can we find peace for conscience, strength for 
duty, power against temptation, comfort in trouble, 
support in the hour of death, hope in looking for¬ 
ward to the grave? We may well ask. These 
things are only found by those who live the life 
of faith in a crucified and risen Christ. 

To whom, indeed, shall we go for help, strength, 
and comfort? We live in a world of troubles, 

•From a sermon by the Right Rev. J. C. Ryle, D. D., Bishop of 
Liverpool, England. 


59 


60 WHAT IF WE TURN FROM CHRIST? 

whether we like it or not. You can no more pre¬ 
vent them, than the Danish king could prevent the 
tide rising and rudely swelling round the royal 
chair. Our bodies are liable to a thousand ail¬ 
ments, and our hearts to a thousand sorrows. 

No creature on earth is so vulnerable and capable 
of intense physical and mental suffering as man. 
Sickness, death, partings, losses, failures, disap¬ 
pointments, and private family trials which no 
other mortal eye sees, will break in upon us from 
time to time, and human nature imperatively de¬ 
mands help to meet them. Alas! where will hu¬ 
man nature find such help if we leave Christ ? 

The plain truth is that nothing but an almighty 
personal Friend will ever meet the legitimate wants 
of man’s sold. Metaphysical notions, philosophical 
theories, abstract ideas, vague speculations about 
the unseen, the infinite, the inner light, and so 
forth, may satisfy a select few for a time. But 
the vast majority of mankind, if they have any 
religion at all, will never be content with a reli¬ 
gion which does not supply them with a person, to 
whom they may look and trust. And this princi¬ 
ple once admitted, where will you find one so per¬ 
fectly fitted to satisfy man as the Christ ? Look 
round the world, and point out, if you can, any ob¬ 
ject of faith fit to be compared with this blessed 
Son of God, set forth before our eyes in the 
Gospels. 

Perhaps some of my younger hearers are se¬ 
cretly thinking that the difficulties of revealed re¬ 
ligion are inexplicable, and trying to persuade 


WHAT IF WE TURN FROM CHRIST? 61 


themselves that they know not “ where to go ” in 
these dark and cloudy days. I entreat them to 
consider that the difficulties of unbelief are far 
greater. 

The great argument of probability is entirely on 
your side. Surely it is wiser to cling to Christ and 
Christianity, with all its alleged difficulties, than to 
launch on an ocean of uncertainties, and travel to¬ 
ward the grave hopeless, comfortless, and profess¬ 
ing to know nothing at all about the unseen world. 
Departure from Christ on account of the sup¬ 
posed hardness of certain doctrines will secure no 
immunity from mental conflicts. The problems of 
Christianity may seem great and deep; but the 
problems of unbelief are greater and deeper still. 

Then let them consider that myriads of men and 
women, in these last eighteen centuries, have' found 
in Christ the “ words of eternal life ” not merely 
“ words ” but solid realities. They have been per¬ 
suaded of them, and embraced them, and found 
them meat and drink to their souls. We are com¬ 
passed about with a great cloud of witnesses, who 
in the faith of these words have lived happy and 
useful lives, and died glorious deaths. Where is he 
that will dare to deny this ? Where shall we find 
such lives and deaths without Christ ? 

It was faith in Christ’s “ words of eternal life ” 
that made St. Peter and St. John stand up boldly 
before the Jewish Council, and confess their Master 
without fear of consequences, saying “There is 
none other name given under heaven among men 
whereby we can be saved.” 


62 WHAT IF WE TURN FROM CHRIST? 

It was faith in Christ’s “ words of eternal life ” 
that made St. Paul come out from Judaism, spend 
his life in preaching the gospel, and say, on the 
brink of the grave, “ I know whom I have believed, 
and that He is able to keep that which I have com¬ 
mitted to Him against that day.” 

It was faith in Christ’s “ words of eternal life ” 
that made Bishop Hooper go boldly to the stake at 
Gloucester, after saying, “ Life is sweet and death 
is bitter ; but eternal life is more sweet and eternal 
death more bitter.” 

It was faith in Christ’s “ words of eternal life ” 
that made Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer en¬ 
dure a fiery death in Oxford, rather than deny the 
principles of the Eeformation. 

It was faith in Christ’s “ words of eternal life ” 
which made Henry Martyn turn his back on ease 
and distinction at Cambridge, go forth to a tropical 
climate, and die a solitary death as a missionary. 

What a fearful contrast to such facts as these ap¬ 
pears in the lives and deaths of those who turn 
their backs on Christ, and seek other masters! 
What fruits can the advocates of non-Christian 
theories, and ideas, and principles, point to with all 
their cleverness ? What holy, loving, peaceful 
quietness of spirit have they exhibited ? What 
victories have they won over darkness, immorality, 
superstition, and sin? What countries have they 
civilized or moralized? What neglected home 
populations have they improved ? It is only those 
who can say with St. Peter, “ Thou hast the words 
of eternal life,” who make a mark on mankind for 


WHAT IF WE TURN FROM CHRIST? 63 

good while they live, and say, “ O death, where is 
thy sting ? ” when they die. 

Let us beware of a religion in which Christ has 
not His rightful place. Let us never try to satisfy 
ourselves with a little cheap formal Christianity, 
taken on carelessly on Sunday morning, and laid 
aside at night, but not influencing us during the 
week. Such Christianity will neither give us peace 
in life, nor hope in death, nor power to resist temp¬ 
tation, nor comfort in trouble. Christ only has 
“ the words of eternal life,” and His words must be 
received, believed, embraced, and made the meat 
and drink of our souls. A Christianity without 
living, felt communion with Him, without grasp of 
the benefits of His blood and intercession, a Chris¬ 
tianity without Christ’s sacrifice and His priest¬ 
hood, is a powerless, wearisome form. 

Let us then “ hold fast the profession of our faith 
without wavering,” if we have reason to hope we 
are Christ’s true servants. Let men laugh at us, 
and try to turn us away as much as they please. 
Let us calmly and humbly say to ourselves at such 
times, “After all, to whom can I go if I leave 
Christ ? ” He has “ words of eternal life.” Myr¬ 
iads find them meat and drink to their souls. I can 
see nothing better. I will cling to Christ and His 
words. They never yet have failed any one who 
trusted them, and they will not fail me. 


X. 


Second Week—Saturday—the Tenth Day of Lent. 

Christ and the Day of Rest . 1 

« That God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to 
whom be praise and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”—I St. 
Peter iv. n. 

The two great cardinal principles on which Sun¬ 
day is founded are rest and worship. And they 
cannot be separated. If you keep a day merely for 
rest, you will find that universal amusement will 
soon creep in upon you, and mean universal labor. 
The principle of worship, of sanctity, of sacredness 
to God is the only principle which can protect 
properly the principle of rest. And, on the other 
hand, you cannot have a day consecrated to wor¬ 
ship and self-recollection, and the fear of God un¬ 
less it is also a day of rest. If you make it an ordi¬ 
nary day with ordinary occupations then you will 
have neither leisure nor taste for dwelling' on the 
realities of the unseen world. 

I should like to remind you once more of the very 
beautiful version of the fourth commandment in 
the book of Deuteronomy. “Keep the Sabbath 
day to sanctify it as the Lord thy God hath com¬ 
manded thee; six days shalt thou labor and do all 

1 From a sermon by Rev. William Macdonald Sinclair, D. D., of 
England. 

64 


CHRIST AND THE DAY OF BEST. 65 

thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of 
the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any 
work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy 
manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor 
thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger 
that is within thy gates, that thy manservant and 
thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.” Here 
the observance is put on its true grounds: rest for 
all alike, high and low, rich and poor. 

The observance of the first day of the week as a 
time for rest and worship is protected by the an¬ 
cient laws of the land. On the first day of the 
week no places of public amusement may be 
opened. On the first day of the week there are 
enactments against trading. The sanctity of the 
day of our Lord’s resurrection is part of the recog¬ 
nized law of the land. There is, indisputably, a 
quiet calm over both town and country-which con¬ 
trasts with the busy operations of other days, and 
is to the weary spirit inexpressibly refreshing. 

How there are two sets of people who would 
wish to alter this happy condition of things. There 
are the theorists who do not like legislation which 
is directly Christian, and who, to a considerable ex¬ 
tent, not themselves believing in religion, would 
desire to abolish any regulations which recognize a 
revelation. And there are the selfish, irreligious, 
worldly people, both in high and in low life, who, 
having themselves no occasion to labor, are per¬ 
fectly reckless as to whether their own pleasures 
and amusements destroy the rest of those who have 
to work for their convenience. 


66 


CHRIST AND THE DAY OF REST. 


“ Sunday is,” as Longfellow called it, “ a golden 
clasp which binds together the volume of the 
week.” “ Sunday,” said Addison, “ clears away 
the rust of the whole week.” “ It is not too much 
to say,” said Norman Macleod, “ that without the 
Sunday the Church of Christ could not, as a visible 
society, exist on earth. The observance of Sunday 
is a public profession of our Christian faith. By its 
profanation we bring disgrace on our religion, and 
give great scandal to our fellow-Christians.” “ So 
diseased,” wrote Julius Hare, “are the appetites of 
those who live in what is called the fashionable 
world, that they mostly account Sunday a very 
dull day; yet of all days it is the one on which our 
highest faculties ought to be employed the most 
vigorously, and to find the deepest, most absorbing 
interest.” “ Oh, what a blessing is Sunday,” ex¬ 
claimed William Wilberforce, the emancipator of 
the slaves, “ interposed between the waves of 
worldly business, like the divine path for the Isra¬ 
elites through Jordan. There is nothing in which 
I would advise you to be more strictly conscien¬ 
tious than in keeping the Sabbath day holy. I can 
truly declare that to me the Sabbath day has been 
invaluable.” 

As a guide for Christians in fulfilling the fourth 
commandment, nothing can be better than the old 
rule of no labor except works of piety, charity and 
necessity. Innocent recreation, such as the society 
of our friends, is encouraged by the example of our 
Lord. Every work which is a heavenly work,— 
every work which is done in the service of the 


CHRIST AND THE DAY OF REST. 67 

kingdom of God, belongs especially to the day of 
rest and is its best support. 

Wisely do our laws sanction the abstaining, as 
far as possible, from labor, leaving it otherwise to 
each man’s own conscience how he shall employ his 
rest. Wise shall we be if we use this priceless op¬ 
portunity for coming especially before our God, 
striving more zealously than is possible on any 
other day to remember why we were born, where 
we are going, why we believe in God, what is the 
meaning of the Father, what is the meaning of the 
Son, what is the meaning of the Holy Ghost, what 
is the purpose of redemption, what are the privi¬ 
leges of our Christian calling, what are our duties as 
shown in the life of our Lord, what are our hopes 
after death, what are our reasons for praying, what 
are the grounds of our faith, what are the riches of 
our inheritance. 

Thus we shall know for ourselves why through 
the resurrection of Christ the day of religious rest 
has gradually passed from the type to the anti-type 
—from the commemoration of the Jewish deliver¬ 
ance from a temporal bondage to the commemora¬ 
tion of Christian redemption from spiritual thral¬ 
dom. We shall understand in our own experience 
why, in the writings of the early Fathers, it is styled 
a solemn and venerable day, the first and chief of 
days, the first-fruits of the week, better than all 
the festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths of the Mosaic 
law, higher than the highest, and to be held in ad¬ 
miration above all other days; the queen, the prin¬ 
cess ; or as an old translator with quaint simplicity 


68 CHRIST AND THE DAY OF REST. 

expresses it, the lady paramount of days, clearly 
and preeminently the first; the day which the Lord 
hath made, that we may rejoice and be glad in it, 
and which, to use the strong word of St. Augustine, 
“ if we are Christians we shall observe,” so “ that 
God in all things may be glorified through Jesus 
Christ, to whom be praise and dominion forever 
and ever. Amen.” 

Above all, let it have its full and proper meaning 
as the consecration of the rest of the w T eek. Just 
as the Christian ministry are chosen out, not for 
special holiness, but because all the Lord’s people 
are holy, all are kings and priests to God, and yet 
some must minister to others in holy things; so the 
first day of the week is adopted, not because all the 
days of our lives are not dedicated to God, but be¬ 
cause by hallowing one more we may hallow the 
others better and more perfectly. 

If you, indeed, wish to be in the spirit of the 
Lord’s day, you will not treat it as something sin¬ 
gular,—a passing episode after which you relapse 
into your ordinary life. It will be to you a day 
which is to communicate its temper and sunshine 
to all the other days of the week. It will be to you 
those brightest hours, toward which all your other 
hours are to approach as nearly as may be. It will 
be to you, not a duty, but a privilege; not a law, 
but a desire; not a task, but a refreshment and 
relaxation. 


XI. 


Third Week—Monday—the Eleventh Day in 
Lent. 

Love Your Neighbor . 1 

u And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted Him, saying, 
Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life ? He said unto him, 
What is written in the law ? How readest thou ? And he answering 
said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with 
all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy 
neighbor as thyself. And He said unto him: Thou hast answered 
right; this do and thou shalt live. But he, willing to justify himself, 
said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor ? ”— St. Luke x. 25-29. 

This lawyer was one of those to whom a precious 
truth had become an empty truism. “ Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself ” was a command so 
familiar to him, that it had ceased to influence his 
conduct. The frequent repetition of the fine senti¬ 
ment, and the steady neglect to turn it into action, 
had produced in him the usual self-complacency of 
the Pharisees. He was evidently taken aback by 
the simple answer of our Lord, “ This do and thou 
shalt live,” which was not only a home-thrust to his 
conscience, but made him look rather foolish before 
the bystanders. To justify himself, therefore, per¬ 
haps to his conscience, perhaps to the onlookers, he 

1 From a sermon by Rev. G. G. Brown, M. A., Rector of All Saints.’ 
Church, Colchester, England. 


69 


70 


LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR. 


put the question, so common in every Christian’s 
life, “ And who is my neighbor ? ” 

The passage suggests two thoughts: 

Firstly, the Divine command, Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself; and secondly, the question, 
Who is my neighbor ? 

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance as¬ 
signed by Christ to love. He summed up the moral 
precepts of the law in the one great commandment 
of love. He made the loving spirit the very essence 
of the Christian character,—the visible evidence of 
His own presence in the soul. Where love is, there 
He is. So the Master taught, and so His greatest 
servants taught. St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John, 
each gave the same high place to love. They dif¬ 
fered on many points, but they agreed on this, that 
the one thing most needful in the Christian is the 
loving heart. 

They each tell us to love our neighbor. Their 
instruction appears straightforward and easy till we 
try to turn it into practice. We can all talk, like 
the lawyer, about loving our neighbors as ourselves; 
only, like him, we are brought up with a start, when 
our Lord suddenly whispers, “This do and thou 
shalt live.” He replied by asking, “Who is my 
neighbor ? ” Who are those whom I am to love as 
myself ? Perhaps he was insincere, and only argued 
for argument’s sake; perhaps he only wished to ex¬ 
cuse his loveless conduct, or to avert a dialectical 
defeat before the multitude; but, whatever his mo¬ 
tive was, he expressed a real difficulty. If we have 
thought about the matter at all, I believe the same 


LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR. 


71 


question lias occurred to us over and over again. 
The difficulty has certainly been present in our 
lives, whether we have consciously expressed it to 
ourselves or not. For instance, does the precept 
mean that I am bound, as a Christian, to love all 
with whom I come into contact ? Does God expect 
a positive feeling of affection to be felt by me for 
every one whom I meet for half an hour, for every 
one with whom I do business ? Am I to love the 
disagreeable people, the bad-tempered, the lazy, the 
selfish ? Am I to love the slanderer, the mischief- 
maker, the liar, the oppressor ? Put the question 
in a concrete form—does every one here to-night 
love the present Sultan of Turkey ? Do you feel 
that you ought to love him ? If you ask yourself 
that plain question, and ask it in the presence of 
God, is the answer not audibly given to your soul 
by the Holy Spirit, that you are not bound to love 
him; that righteous anger is the only feeling that 
such an inhuman monster should call out; that you 
may breathe, with a clear conscience, the words of 
the 109th Psalm, “ Let his days be few, and let an¬ 
other take his office.” 

The question , Who is my neighbor f could be easily 
answered if the world were wholly good. It would 
then be easy to love every one as yourself. The 
difficulty arises because so much that is not good is 
to be found on every hand. It is hard, indeed im¬ 
possible, to love every one, because sin in so many 
forms is present around us, as well as within us. 
You know this one who is a cheat; how can you 
love him ? You know another who is a hypocrite; 


72 


LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR. 


how can you love him ? Another is an oppressor, 
a slave-driver, a hard money-grabber. Another has 
a spiteful heart and a mischievous tongue ; another 
is vain and silly; another is cold and selfish. Can 
you love them at all ? It is difficult to forgive, dif¬ 
ficult even to make allowances for such people; but 
as for loving them, we cannot do it; and God can¬ 
not ask of us impossibilities. Yet, on the other 
hand, our Saviour bids us live with hearts tender 
and full of love, gentle even to our enemies. St. 
Paul tells us that the greatest force on earth is 
charity; and St. Peter pleads with us, “ Above all, 
have fervent charity one to another.” 

The difficulty of deciding how we ought to feel 
toward certain people quickly melts away when we 
remember that anger against wrongdoing is 'per¬ 
fectly consistent with Christian charity. The Son 
of God, the very Lord of Love Himself, felt a burn¬ 
ing indignation against the selfish, hard, religious 
men of his day. Look at His terrible words of 
wrath in the 23d chapter of St. Matthew, 13th to 
33d verses. He begins, “ Woe unto you, Scribes and 
Pharisees, hypocrites,” and He ends with, “ O ye 
serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape 
the judgment of hell.” Or look at St. Paul’s lan¬ 
guage, when his spirit is fired at the sight of wrong. 
He called the high priest “a whited sepulchre.” 
He told the Jews at Antioch “ that they had thrust 
the word of God from them, and judged themselves 
unworthy of everlasting life.” Of his enemy, Alex¬ 
ander the coppersmith, he said, “ the Lord reward 
him according to his works.” One quotation will 


LOVE YOUK KEIGHBOB. 73 

show how St. Peter could feel toward hardened and 
impenitent wrongdoers. “ Their sentence from of 
old lingereth not, and their destruction slumbereth 
not; they are like natural brute beasts.” 

The example of our Lord, then, as well as that of 
St. Paul and St. Peter, shows us that righteous in¬ 
dignation, not forgiving gentleness or easy indiffer¬ 
ence, is the feeling we ought to have toward the 
hypocrite, the oily liar, the successful oppressor, the 
betrayer of the innocent. Who then is the neigh¬ 
bor that I must love as myself? The simplest an¬ 
swer is suggested by our Lord in the parable of the 
Good Samaritan —your neighbor is any one whom 
you can help. The hypocrite may be your neigh¬ 
bor, if you can help him by curing him of his insin¬ 
cerity. The liar is your neighbor if you can make 
him truthful. The grumbler is your neighbor if 
you can bring contentment and cheerfulness into 
his heart. Even your enemy may be your neighbor. 
If the enmity originated in any fault of yours, you 
must make amends. If he is to blame, if he has in¬ 
jured you, the commandment, “ Love your enemy,” 
does not mean that you must overlook his offense, 
and feel toward him as if it had not been commit¬ 
ted. It requires a harder thing of you—that you 
shall go to him in a friendly spirit, and try to bring 
him to repentance. The poor man who needs your 
money; the sick, whom you can visit and cheer; 
the mourner, whom you can comfort; the fallen, 
whom you may raise; the lonely, whose lives you 
may brighten—they are all your neighbors, for 
there is something you can do for them. Your 


74 


LOVE YOUR KEtGHBOR. 


love can express itself in the effort to help them, 
in the fervent prayer for them, in the word of 
sympathy, in the home-thrust rebuke, lovingly 
given. But what, you will say, of those whom I 
cannot serve in any way ? Most of the people I 
meet have no particular need of my help. How 
am I to feel toward them? Are they not neigh¬ 
bors, to be loved as myself ? Yes, they are. But 
be not misled by the words to be loved as my¬ 
self. Translate them into “ feel toward others as 
you would they should feel toward youf and you 
will see at once that you are not expected to develop 
strong affections for every one you meet. What 
you can do is what you would wish them to do. 
You can have a general lovingness of heart, a kind 
friendliness, a warm geniality of manner, at least a 
readiness to be pleasant to them. 

But after all, some of us may feel, I knew this all 
before. I know I ought to be loving, ready to help 
whom I can, courteous and kind to all, except the 
hard and impenitent evil-doers, who rarely cross my 
path. My difficulty is to do it. “ This do and thou 
shalt live,” says my Saviour to my soul. “ Alas! 
Lord, I cannot,” my soul replies;. “ I have so little 
love within, my heart is naturally so cold.” If you 
honestly feel that, you are already on the way to 
Heaven; for you know your weak point and your 
besetting want, you know that more love is the great 
need of your life. And you also know where your 
want may be supplied. Ask for a loving heart, and 
it will not be denied. Ask for it in faith, believing 
that you shall receive it. Ask for it with the per- 


LOVE YOtTB NEIGHBOR. 


75 

sistent prayer of the importunate widow, and it 
shall be given you by the Father, who knows how 
to give good gifts to His children. Other things 
you may ask for without receiving—more money, 
worldly success, better health, more happiness, God 
may refuse in answer to your prayer. But the heart 
that loves He will not, nay, cannot refuse, for His 
own true nature is love, and you are made in His 
image. 


XII. 


Third Week—Tuesday—the Twelfth Day of 
Lent. 

Use your Opportunities. 1 

“ Redeeming the time.”—E ph. v. 16. 

Now these words do not express clearly St. 
Paul’s meaning. He is not speaking of what we 
commonly call time, but rather of opportunity, and 
what he says to us is this: Look out for oppor¬ 
tunities, lay hold of them and make use of them ; 
or, to use his striking language: Buy them up in 
the market that you may turn them to profit; for 
that is what his words really mean. So, you see, 
the subject suggested to us by these words of the 
Apostle is this—the right use of opportunities. 

Now it is not too much to say that this right use 
of opportunities constitutes the very science of life, 
if we may so speak. If you will think of it for a 
moment you will see that it is true. In every de¬ 
partment of life this is the underlying principle 
which must regulate us: this is the great secret of 
success, this buying up of opportunities. Look at 
the men of the world ! Look at your own experi¬ 
ence ! Look at the statesman, how cautiously he 
waits, sometimes year after year with a great per- 

1 From a sermon by the Rt. Hon. and Most Rev. Wm. D. Magla- 
gan D. D., Archbishop of York, England. 

76 


USE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES. 77 

plexing, terrible question before him, which he 
longs to solve, difficulties he longs to get rid of, but 
he waits till the proper moment, till the right op¬ 
portunity, and then seizes and makes use of it. 
Look at the merchant, how he watches every turn 
in the market, how he reads daily in the news¬ 
papers the state of the money market and the trade 
abroad and at home, and waits long before he 
makes his venture, but when the opportunity olfers 
to him how readily, how speedily he makes use of 
it! Think of the doctor watching over some 
serious case where life is in danger, and all may 
depend upon some critical operation. Day after 
day he says, “ I cannot venture yet; things are not 
ripe for it, and we must wait the time.” But when 
the time comes, then with precision, with energy 
and readiness, he does his work, it may be for the 
saving of a precious life. 

Look at the soldier, the general regulating the 
movements of a great campaign, how he watches 
every march of the enemy, every change of position 
he takes up, before he strikes his final blow, wait¬ 
ing and deferring and hoping, yet pausing till at 
last the opportunity offers—the enemy has made a 
mistake, he has placed himself in a weak position, 
and then the general makes use of the opportunity, 
and so gains his victory. Yes, I say, the right use 
of opportunities is really the great science of life, it 
is the rule by which the men of the world act and 
by which they win success—the right use of oppor¬ 
tunities. 

But it is equally true in the spiritual world , only, 


Y8 USE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES. 

alas ! the children of this world are wiser for their 
own purposes than the children of light. They far 
more readily and eagerly use their opportunities 
than God’s children do. And there is one great 
difference: in the world, the world of commerce, 
the world of warfare, the world of science, a man 
may fail for lack of opportunities. How often one 
has heard a man say, as old age surprised him in a 
state of poverty and failure, “I never had my 
chance. My neighbor there had his opportunity 
and he made use of it. I give him credit for the 
wisdom with which he used his chance, but he 
had it, and I had none.” You have all known 
cases like that, and very sad they are, for there is a 
good deal of truth in them, although it is, perhaps, 
not the whole truth. But in the spiritual world 
that can never be. There is no lack of opportuni¬ 
ties. God makes them for us, and with His wise 
foresight and Fatherly care He puts them within 
our reach. The great thing is that we should seize 
them and use them to His glory and to our own 
good. How that is something of what St. Paul 
means by redeeming the time. I say there is no 
lack of opportunities in the spiritual world. Life is 
full of opportunities, as full as the heaven is of the 
stars, if only we had eyes to see them and wisdom 
to use them when they come. 

Hay, life itself is one great opportunity. Let us 
think of life in that way. This life of ours in this 
world is really, when you look at the essence of it, 
and the inner purpose of it, a great opportunity 
which God gives to each one of us. It may last 


USE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES. 


T9 


for a longer or a shorter time—that matters not. 
It is an opportunity, and if we make right use of it 
it will end in blessing and everlasting joy. What 
is the great object of our life ? How seldom we 
face that question ! How seldom we sit^ down by 
ourselves and ask, “ To what end was I born, and 
for what cause came I into this world ? ” Surely 
not only to get on, as people believe in whatever 
line of life we may have chosen, whatever may be 
our calling, not merely to get on, to get above our 
neighbors, to gain for ourselves a certain amount 
of money, or of comfort, or of pleasure, and then 
—and then!—when health fails, and old age comes, 
to be buried in a grave. My friends, God made 
us for nobler things than these. It is a miserable 
conception of the purposes of life when we limit 
its great ends, as we very often do—do we not ?— 
to such secondary aims and objects as these. 

The temptation comes to us to think of life wholly 
from this miserable money and pleasure-seeking 
point of view. 

What is happiness from the Christian’s point of 
view f Is it not the satisfaction, the perfect and 
permanent satisfaction, of all the nobler desires and 
capacities which God has implanted in us ? That 
is happiness! Men may seek to satisfy their de¬ 
sires in ignoble or in wicked ways, but yet they 
are right in their conception of happiness—it is the 
perfect and the permanent satisfaction of desire, 
but then we must not forget the higher desires 
which God has implanted in each one of us whom 
He has made in His own image. So happiness is, 


80 


USE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES. 


after all, our search. Happiness is what God’s 
Word sets before us, and it is described to us in 
beautiful words, which are household words among 
us, as we speak of those joys which are at God’s 
right hand, the unspeakable joys which God has 
prepared for them that love Him. That is happi¬ 
ness from the Christian’s point of view, and in the 
search for happiness lies the way to work in life. 

The Christian knows that the happiness of which 
he is in search must be perfect, and it must be per¬ 
manent, and therefore it is not a happiness that 
belongs to this world; it is a happiness which 
waits for him in another world and for which this 
world is nothing more than a brief preparation. If 
only we thoroughly get hold of that law and hide 
it in our hearts and have it continually present to 
our minds, we shall be watchful for opportunities 
and the more eager to use them when they come— 
opportunities of getting ready for that perfect and 
that permanent happiness which waits for us in our 
Heavenly Father’s home. 

Our Lord has told us that the great secret of prep¬ 
aration for the life to come is not only to know God 
and to love God, but to grow like to God. Hay by 
day we ought to be seeking to become more like 
our Father in heaven. 

There are seasons of grace which God sends to us 
in our private lives, there are others which come to 
us in the life of the Church, and such a time is Lent. 
The yearly season of Lent is a great and a blessed 
opportunity. 

And so let me end with one or two practical sug- 


USE YOUR OIMPORTUNITIES. 


81 


gestions with regard to this Lenten season. What 
is it all about ? It is a tim q for looking back on our 
past lives and seeing how they look, and what 
record there must be written down of them in the 
Book of God—dragging out into the light boldly 
and honestly our sins, then with true penitence of 
heart to lay the burden of our sin at the feet of the 
Crucified; His precious blood can cleanse from sin. 

And so, again, out of that penitence is to spring 
endeavor after higher things. If every remem¬ 
brance of sin is to us a fresh stimulus and encour¬ 
agement to higher endeavor, if all through this holy 
season we are trying deliberately to get the better 
of some sin, some evil habit that still clings to us— 
it may be a sin of omission or a sin of commission 
—let us strive by God’s strength to overcome it, 
strive by the guidance of the Holy Spirit to escape 
from it, strive by the love of Jesus to renounce it, 
and we should then, indeed, be redeeming the time, 
buying up the precious opportunities and gaining 
unspeakable blessing to ourselves. 


XIII. 


Third Week—Wednesday—the Thirteenth Day 
of Lent. 

On Being Helpful to Others. 1 

“ The law of Christ. . . . Bear ye one another’s burdens.”— 

Galatians vi. 2 . 

Sympathy, like every other feeling implanted in 
us by nature, is intended to prompt us to action. 
It is of no use to feel with others, unless we are 
thereby stimulated to do something for them. 

Life, in the true sense of the word, is not feeling 
but work. Napoleon’s test, “ What has he done ? ” 
is perfectly applicable in the moral sphere. The 
good man, no less than the great man, is the man 
who has done something. Out on the sympathy of 
those persons who shed floods of tears over the 
imaginary woes described in a novel or a play, and 
never do anything to lessen the actual woes around 
them, of which those descriptions are but copies! 
Out on the sympathy which always tries to thrust 
the burden of relief upon some other shoulders! 
Sympathy is of no use unless it leads to action. 

And further, it is of no use unless it leads to the 
right hind of action. It is possible to act on the 
instigation of impulse, and at the same time to do 
more harm than good. “ Some rub the sore when 

1 From a sermon by Rev. A. W. Momerie, D. Sc., of England, 

852 


ON BEING HELPFUL TO OTHERS. 83 

they would heal the wound; ” and so the sufferer 
would have been better off if they had not sympa¬ 
thized with him. There are few persons in the 
world who more often act ill, than those who are 
always declared to mean well. It is not enough 
then, to have sympathy; it is not enough to act on 
the instigation of sympathy. If we would be really 
helpful, we must be sure that we are acting rightly. 
And to do this, we must see the bearing of our ac¬ 
tion upon the circumstances of the case. Helpful¬ 
ness may be defined as the judicious carrying out of 
sympathy. 

Here we have another and a striking illustration 
of the importance of thought. We shall never be 
helpful until we learn to think. If our sympathy 
is to be of any use, it must be thoughtfully, and 
not thoughtlessly, acted on. Just as it is not 
enough to desire our own good, but if we are to 
achieve it, we must carefully consider the best 
means to be employed—so it is not enough to de¬ 
sire the good of others. If that good is to be pro¬ 
moted by us, we must give the subject at least as 
much reflection as prudence would require us to 
give to the promotion of our own. To be really, 
wisely helpful, we must make the interests of others 
part of our own scheme of life. 

Let me give you two illustrations of the necessity 
there is for thought, if sympathy is to be converted 
into helpfulness. Let us take the case of speech. It 
is impossible to overestimate the amount of good, 
as it is impossible to overestimate the amount of 
harm, which we are capable of doing, by the use or 


84 


ON BEING HELPFUL TO OTHERS. 


abuse of the tongue. Many a man has been saved 
from moral ruin, many a man has been prevented 
from throwing up the game of life in despair, by a 
few well-chosen words of remonstrance or encour¬ 
agement. But the mere feeling of sympathy alone 
will not suggest the seasonable word; that can 
only be arrived at by thought. 

There is nothing about which we ought to be so 
careful as our speech; and yet there is nothing in 
regard to which most of us are so careless. We 
say whatever first occurs to us, without waiting to 
consider the result. And there are many of us, to 
whom it is generally the wrong thing that occurs 
first. 

There is a large number of well-meaning persons, 
who always manage—quite contrary to their in¬ 
tention—to wound instead of soothe. They say 
what is harmful through sheer stupidity. And this 
stupidity is sin; for it is merely a form of laziness 
—laziness shrinking from the fatigue of thought. 
When they find they have caused pain, they try to 
excuse themselves by saying they “didn’t think.” 
A pitiful excuse ! Why didn’t they think ? What 
is the use of being a man if you don’t think ? Such 
people would appear to be driven into speech by an 
inordinate dread of silence. They seem to imagine 
that a terrible disgrace would have befallen them, 
could they ever be accused of having for an instant 
held their tongues. They will say anything rather 
than say nothing. No wonder they do harm. “ It 
is never more difficult to talk well,” says one, 
“ than when we are ashamed to be silent.” But 


ON BEING HELPFUL TO OTHERS. 


85 


this dread of silence is extremely silly. It was a 
maxim of the Duke of Wellington’s, “ When you 
don’t know what to do, do nothing.” And the cor¬ 
responding maxim is just as self-evidently valid,— 
when you don’t know what to say, when you are 
not sure of the right and wise thing to say, say 
nothing. Not only in politics, but in conversation, 
there is much need oftentimes of a “ masterly in¬ 
activity.” Silence may occasionally be more help¬ 
ful—nay, even more eloquent, than speech. 

Still, if we would take the trouble to think, we 
might generally, even in the most desperate cases, 
after the first paroxysms of the sufferer’s anguish 
were over—we might generally find something to 
say that would be really helpful to him. 

There is one other point very apt to be over¬ 
looked. I refer to the helpfulness of example. By 
what we say and do, we are only directly affecting 
the comfort of others, but we are indirectly chang¬ 
ing their characters. We may not only contribute 
to their happiness, but we may make them morally 
better. By acting rightly ourselves, we may help 
others, may make it easier for others, to bear their 
burden of duty. There is no surer way of helping 
a man to cope with his difficulties and to conquer 
his temptations, than by showing him that we have 
obtained the mastery over ours. There is no surer 
way of stimulating a man to give up bad habits, 
than by exemplifying, in our own lives, the beauty 
and the charm of good ones. And the stimulus of 
our example will not end with death. We may 
lighten the burden of duty for generations yet un- 


86 


ON BEING HELPFUL TO OTHEBS. 


born. By living wisely and well, we shall confer 
incalculable blessings upon many who will never 
know us, who may never even hear of us. We may 
give them a better moral start in life than, but for 
our efforts, they could possibly have had. But alas 
for those who come after us, if we live unwisely 
and ill! Through no fault of their own, but en¬ 
tirely because of our misdeeds, it may be next to 
impossible for them to be anything but bad. We 
may make their burden of duty a burden too heavy 
to be borne. 



XIY. 

Third Week—Thursday—the Fourteenth Day of 
Lent. 

Responsibility for Others. 1 

“ Where is Abel thy brother ? ”— Gen. iv. 9. 

Let us take this question as if it were addressed 
to ourselves individually, and let us lay it well to 
heart. Let us think of it as bringing before us our 
responsibility for others. It is a very serious ques¬ 
tion ; it calls for an answer; it must be answered. 
May God give us grace to answer it aright! And, 
first of all, we will consider the question as it re¬ 
lates to those who are near and dear to us; those 
whose names and faces are familiar to us; those 
who are connected with us by the bonds of kindred 
or affection, parents, wife, husband, children, all 
that inner circle of friends and relations; all whom 
we acknowledge to have been, in some sense or 
other, committed by God to our safe-keeping and 
care—How have I discharged my responsibility ? 

What have I done for the temporal welfare of 
those who are so closely connected with me by ties 
of kindred, and who ought to be so bound up with 
me in the bonds of affection as to be included in the 
term “ brethren ” ? Have I diligently worked for 

1 From a sermon by Rev. W. C. Ingram, Canon of Peterborough 
Cathedral, England. 


87 


88 RESPONSIBILITY ^OR OTHERS. 

them and tried in every way to advance their best 
interests ? Then as to their social happiness. 
Have I thought for them and cared for them, put¬ 
ting away all selfish thoughts and motives ? Have 
I, by purity, love and gentleness, done my part to¬ 
ward making their life bright, happy and lovely, 
and such as it ought to be ? 

Then, again, as to the intellectual training and 
welfare of the children: Where are they as to 
this, so far as I have had to do with the matter ? 
Have I given them a good education and wise in¬ 
struction, such as is best calculated to enable them 
to take their proper place in the world amongst 
those with whom it is reasonable to expect that 
they will be placed ; having in my mind a high and 
noble, but not in any sense a foolish or extravagant 
ambition as to their future? Has this education 
been carried on with due regard to their higher 
powers ? Have I tried to instil into them the im¬ 
portance of the training of the conscience and the 
duty of obeying it ? How about their knowledge 
of the Faith ? Do they know, and do they under¬ 
stand the great dogmas of the Faith ? Have they 
an intelligent knowledge of the great verities of the 
Christian religion ? Where are they so far as the 
matter of their religious knowledge goes ? Do I 
know where they are ? 

The image of God is stamped upon every soul 
born into the world. That image is, since the Fall, 
marred and defaced, it is true, but it is still there. 
The work of God the Holy Ghost is the restoration 
of that image, the bringing it out more and more 


RESPONSIBILITY FOR OTHERS. 89 

brightly, clearly and distinctly. Ah! then the 
question, looked at from this point of view, be¬ 
comes invested with a meaning of terrible impor¬ 
tance. “ Where is Abel thy brother ? ” 

What have I done to help forward that work of 
the restoration of the image of God in the soul of 
my brother? Have I done anything to hinder 
that work, or to obscure that image ? 

The question is a most serious one. Let us look 
at it a little more closely and consider it somewhat 
in detail. 

First, then, there is the question of the example 
which I have set before others, especially before 
those of my own household who come day by day, 
in a greater or less degree, under the influence of 
my example. What has the influence of my ex¬ 
ample been? Have I by it led those thus com¬ 
mitted to my safe-keeping nearer to, or further 
from God? Have they seen or heard me make 
light of sin ? Have they seen me careless or neg¬ 
lectful of the worship of God ? Have they seen 
me lax in the observance of His laws ? Has my 
life been a real help to them in their spiritual life, 
or has it in any sense laid stumbling-blocks in their 
way ? 

Again, there is not only the question of example, 
but there is also that of precept. Have I tried with 
all my power to teach them as well as to lead them 
in the right way ? Have I watched with prudent 
care the teaching they have received from others, 
as well as that which I myself have given them ? 
What kind of wise and prudent supervision have I 


90 


RESPONSIBILITY FOR OTHERS. 


exercised over the books they have read ? Have I 
been careful that the tone of conversation in the 
home should be such as to maintain, clear and 
strong, the purity and the faith of my household ? 
And is not this question of the tone and character 
of conversation one which needs special attention 
in the present day ? Is it, generally speaking, in¬ 
capable of improvement ? 

Then there is also the question of my prayers. 
Have I been very careful to surround all my dear 
ones with that shield of protection ? 

Parents are all anxious that their children should 
do well and get on well in life. They very eagerly 
and earnestly seek, in their behalf, the influence of 
those who may be able to help them on. They 
leave nothing undone that will advance their tem¬ 
poral welfare. And these efforts are right; beyond 
all question it is their duty to make them. But are 
they so earnest or so diligent as they ought to be 
in their daily intercessions to Him who alone can 
give to them the highest of all blessings, viz, the 
grace to lead a pure and holy life ? 

Now as regards this aspect of the question of our 
responsibility, we do not suggest that any one of 
us would for a moment wish to deny it, or to re¬ 
pudiate it. We all accept it. Those thus near and 
dear to us, are placed in our safe-keeping. We ac¬ 
knowledge it. But the question for each of us to 
consider is this : Do I really keep the thought of 
this responsibility sufficiently before me, and do I 
really discharge my obligations in all this as I ought 
to do ? 


RESPONSIBILITY FOR OTHERS. 


91 


The matter, however, reaches further out than 
this. Eesponsibility rests upon us in some way or 
other, with regard to every one with whom we are 
brought into contact; the friends and acquaintances 
of our life; all those with whom we have business 
relations; the various members of that circle of 
society in which we move; our more casual ac¬ 
quaintances ; the fellow-travelers we meet on our 
journeys—there is a responsibility resting upon us 
with regard to them all. 

“ Where is thy brother ? ” Where is he morally 
and spiritually, so far as the influence, however 
slight it may have been, which I have exercised 
over him goes ? 

To have laughed at the evil or profane joke; to 
have spoken the thoughtless, the foolish, or the 
angry word; to have exhibited irritability or im¬ 
patience—to say nothing of far more grievous 
stumbling-blocks than these—must have had some 
influence over others. 

Ah, alas! we must each confess that, at some 
time or other, we have said and done something, 
the effect of which was evil on some one else,— 
something tending to deface in the soul of another 
the image of God ; something which tended to lead 
that soul into temptation, if not into sin. 

Marvelous opportunities have been afforded us 
in life of helping others to resist temptation, and to 
stand firm. How have these opportunities been 
used ? Have we used them at all ? “W here is thy 
brother ? ” The question is a very searching one. 

Ah, how the question widens out as we think of 


92 RESPONSIBILITY FOR OTHERS. 

it! Perhaps we have never truly realized that in 
some sense we are responsible to God for those 
whom we may never have seen. We say respon¬ 
sible in some sense because the responsibility ex¬ 
tends only so far as does our power to help. 
“ Where is thy brother ? ” What have I done of 
my alms to stay or alleviate, in ever so slight a 
degree, that poverty which, with all its carking 
cares, so often ends in crushing out hope and bring¬ 
ing despair? What have I done by quietly and 
consistently living the faith I profess, to strengthen 
the faith of others, and thus to check the spread of 
that irreligion which is so common in the world 
around me ? What have I done by a life of purity 
in thought, word and deed, to help others to resist 
evil, and to stay the tide of that evil laxity of 
morals that is destroying the manhood of the na¬ 
tion ? What have I done by my prayers and by 
my alms to spread abroad the light of the Gospel 
of Christ in the dark places of the earth; not 
merely in the dark places of heathendom, but also 
in the dark places at home, which the mere light 
of a refined civilization can never of itself brighten ? 
“ Where is thy brother ? ” 


XY. 


Third Week—Friday—the Fifteenth Day of 
Lent. 

Mutual Help. 1 

“ Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus for to seek Saul.”— Acts xi. 25 . 

The new harvest, the new religious opportuni¬ 
ties at Antioch needed more workers, and St. Bar¬ 
nabas sought St. Paul to help him. This compan¬ 
ionship in work suggests first of all the general 
thought of the mutual influence of companions. 
Some are made by their companions, some are 
marred; some would have been unable to express 
themselves in the world without such aid, some 
would have been great had it not been for such a 
hindrance. A man is made or marred by his 
friends, in a way in which he would hardly care to 
believe, in the mysterious influence which asserts 
itself in the words, the example, the gradual shap¬ 
ing of a friend. We are associated with others, 
those whom we choose and those whom we would 
avoid, those who do us good, and those who may 
easily do us harm—personal friends, characters in 
books, business associates, casual acquaintances, 
those who simply influence us as part of the world 
in which we are called to play our part. 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Canon Newbolt of England. 

93 


94 


MUTUAL HELP. 


Again we are dependent on others for some of the 
richest privileges of our life. Just as an unknown 
Ananias baptizes the great apostle of the Gentiles, 
we are dependent on others for Confirmation, for 
our spiritual food in Holy Communion, for all the 
rich stores of grace which God has left us in His 
Church. It would seem that in some cases, human 
nature without the particular influence which God 
designed to be brought to bear on it, would be like 
a magnificent instrument of music, with no one at 
hand to play upon it and evoke its powers. 

How are we learning to adapt ourselves and 
profit by our relationship to others ? The whole 
tendency of life seems to be for each to make him¬ 
self the centre round which everything turns, as if 
the sun shone for him alone, and the affairs of the 
world were regulated for his benefit, as if friends 
lived to add to his amusement, and died for his en¬ 
richment, as if the health of others were of little 
account provided that his own house was orna¬ 
mented, or even as if the souls of others were of no 
concern to him so long as he could find pleasure. 
The sending forth the disciples two by two by 
Christ is the setting forth of the principle of mu¬ 
tual responsibility and cooperation; and this is a 
principle which has to fight to the death with human 
selfishness in its coarsest as well as in its subtlest 
forms. 

It is surely unnecessary to dwell on the coarser 
forms of a sinful selfishness, where men use their 
power, their position, their influence to corrupt 
Others simply to enable them to follow their own 


MUTUAL HELP. 


95 


gratifications, either apparently from a feeling of 
loneliness which makes them seek to associate 
others in their guilt, or from a feeling of hatred at 
the sight of virtue which is a protest to their own 
wickedness, or from pure malignity, which, like the 
false tongue, loves to speak words that may do 
hurt, and loves lies more than righteousness. But 
there are, short of this extreme development, some 
ugly forms of selfishness which a Christian ought 
to cast on one side as unworthy of his high profes¬ 
sion. Here are two men who call themselves rivals, 
they are engaged in the same pursuits, and follow 
out for the most part the same interests; they 
dwell on the two banks of the river of this life as 
it passes by them; the same stream washes the 
property of each, bringing the same advantages and 
the same opportunities. But now it seems to change 
its course, some storm disturbs it, some barrier de¬ 
flects it, it rounds a corner, or shifts a boundary, or 
seems to give one an unfair advantage over the 
other. The stream of popularity shifts, or the tide 
of favor turns to one side, or advantage comes to 
one and not to the other; and bickering and dis¬ 
putes embitter the lives of those who before God 
and before men are neighbors, and whom a policy 
of give and take would mutually benefit. Look at 
the mournful page which lies open under the head 
of jealousy. The arms of those who should be 
united against the common foe are turned against 
each other, and the work of God languishes. 

How many homes are being made unhappy, be¬ 
cause one or more members choose to ignore every 


96 


MUTUAL HELP. 


one’s rights but their own. Look at the selfish 
man, who can think only of his own desires and his 
own work, who has not a word of love or tender¬ 
ness to bestow on those who have been making for 
him that atmosphere of home and comfort, which 
he demands as a right, and any defect in which he 
would indignantly resent. Look at the selfishness 
of the man of pleasure, who spends all he possibly 
can get on himself, who never gives anything but 
the smallest coin in church, who helps no societies 
which are laboring for the welfare of their fellow- 
creatures, who disposes of mission work with an 
epigram, and dismisses the Church with a sarcasm, 
who is fenced round with reasons why he should 
never give, who is ready with arguments why he 
should always receive. There is nothing like sel¬ 
fishness to ruin communities, to wreck enterprises, 
to hamper the Church, to make families unhappy, 
and life unworthy and unfruitful. 

Neither can we stop here. God, in His provi¬ 
dence, as we have seen, puts His children into cir¬ 
cumstances of difficulty and associates them with 
those from whom they would fain be released. 
How difficult it is to avoid a harsh censoriousness 
which breaks the bruised reed, and quenches the 
smoking flax. 

It is a beautiful saying of the great Saint Igna¬ 
tius : “ Bear all, put up with all, even as God bear- 

eth with thee.” 

My brethren, Christ does not want us to struggle 
to heaven alone. Bern ember that Creed which be¬ 
gins with “ I ” loses itself in the “ Holy Catholic 


MUTUAL HELP. 


97 


Church” and “the Communion of Saints.” You 
have duties toward those with whom God has as¬ 
sociated you; do not selfishly keep your religion to 
yourself, but make it easier to be good for those 
who have not got your faith. Do not shut off your 
religious life into Sunday, or think only of your 
own salvation, but whether you eat or drink, or 
whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. There 
are husbands and wives who have grown old to¬ 
gether, who have learned each from each that 
which has rounded and finished their faith. Sons 
like St. Augustine sit with mothers like Monica, 
and gaze out upon the wonders of God, and com¬ 
pose their hearts with mutual love. Many a man 
would have been dumb without his chronicler, or 
would have fallen down faint in battle without his 
armor-bearer. To have helped another to live, to 
have enabled another to speak, to have lifted an¬ 
other out of the dust, or shielded him from the 
storm, this would be to follow the guidance of Him 
who, when sending out the apostles into the world, 
sent them out two by two. 


XYI. 


Third Week—Saturday—the Sixteenth Day of 
Lent. 

No One Else can do Our Duty . 1 

“ Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.”—S t. James i. 22. 

The. fault which St. James here condemns was 
not irreligion or indifference. It was not acting a 
part or trying to deceive others. What was it 
then ? It was in not living up to what they were 
taught. Performance lagged behind knowledge. 
They knew their duty, but did it not. The*prac¬ 
tical summing up of Christian life in all its contacts 
with the world is Duty. We are to do our duty ir¬ 
respective of our inclinations, to go straight to the 
mark. Let me ask you to consider one or two 
things which may help some of us to do our duty 
better, and help us to overcome our weaknesses and 
our temptations. 

First, we ought each of us to have a proper idea 
of the importance of our worlc. I do not mean its 
importance to our own selves only. There is no 
one who is not quite able to see when it is pointed 
out to him, that he is a part of a whole—a part of 
a connected whole. His life is not like a grain of 
sand on a shore. Other lives have preceded his, 

1 From a sermon by Archbishop Benson, delivered when he was 
master of Wellington College, England. 

98 


L Of Q 


NO ONE ELSE CAN DO OUR DUTY. 99 

other lives are bound up in his; his conduct and 
character are acting upon others; those who are 
interested in him, who love him, who are friends 
with him, work with him, play with him, idle with 
him, or—far better things perhaps which I need 
not name—each of those who are connected with 
him, are connected with them too, and influence 
them. And this is the way that human life goes 
on—not as I said like grains of sand, but like 
meshes in a fabric, each one mesh touching and 
holding in his place four or five, and each of those 
four or five others. So that if we may say so, the 
world’s life may be compared to a coat of chain 
armor, and every one of us is a mesh or link in it. 
Well, now you know that, if the least mesh or link 
breaks, it sets loose four or five others, and these 
four or five others all lack the support they ought 
to have on that one side, and throw an undue 
weight on each of the meshes they hang upon; and 
then comes some stress on that particular point, or 
else a general stretching of the whole; one link 
fails, and others cannot take the additional strain, 
and then there is an opening for a wound, or a 
general tearing. The safety is gone, and that is 
what comes of an unfaithful, failing link. In the 
same way a society may be imperiled by the failure 
in duty of one member. 

I beg you therefore to consider the importance 
of your own life—the importance of your own 
work, of your own conduct, not as affecting your 
future, but just because you are placed by God to 
be a member of a family, of a school, of a neigh- 


100 NO ONE ELSE CAN DO OUR DUTY. 

borhood, of a nation, of a Church—an importance 
which belongs to you, as soon as ever you are a 
member of any of these, and grows in importance, 
as you grow in age and in power. 

Second, there is another way in which you may 
see how important it is that you should fulfil your 
duty rightly. God Himself, working through many 
means, gave you your position and your being. 
Does God concern Himself with unimportant 
things? Has He set in movement all the chains 
of circumstances which brought you where you are, 
for nothing ? It is not as if He had just thrown 
you, you know not how, in a desert land. You 
could not be where you are, but for endless com¬ 
binations which our convictions fasten on, as having 
been made in God’s providence for you. They are 
brought to bear on you from distant times and 
places. Can it be of little moment how you use 
what God has thus marvelously arranged ? Nat¬ 
uralists have shown us the extraordinary import 
which attaches to any simple plant, or animal, or 
insect; how its existence affects that of another, 
and so that of a third, the through that many more, 
so that there is not the most insignificant creature 
which has not its peculiar function to fulfil in the 
arrangement of physical nature. It is exactly 
what our Lord taught us; “ Not a sparrow falls 
to the ground without our Father; ” and you— 
“ you are of more value than many sparrows,” for 
“even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” 

Think, then, that God calls us to fill a specially 
appointed place, to do some duty and work in life 


NO ONE ELSE CAN DO OtTB EtJTY. lOl 

which no one else could do, because no one else is 
set to do it, as a part of God’s plan,—which will go 
unfulfilled if we are unfaithful. 

Consider too that, if this be so, there can be no 
ground for the complaint which we hear sometimes 
that we are not equal to that which is given us to 
do—that therefore others may be called to noble 
life, but we are overmuch hindered in ours. 

It is not so. God who gave the place and gave 
the work, calculated also the powers which were 
given to do it; and if we will realize that, we shall 
find we have energy for what He requires. We 
shall find no time left for trifling, and we shall 
find no room for discontent. 


XVII 


Fourth Week—Monday—the Seventeenth Day 
of Lent. 

The Soul’s Need and God’s Nature . 1 

“ My soul is athirst for God.”—Ps. xlii. 2. 

The longing of my better self is to be delivered 
from sin. Who can do it ? Who can free me from 
worldliness and evil temper and evil desire ? Who 
can deliver me from sin ? 

I open the pages of the gospel story, and straight 
I come across Jesus Christ. A startling figure! 
An unrivaled picture! An unexampled life! 
None other like that in history. What is this 
Jesus Christ? “The Representative of humanity,” 
say the half believer and the true believer alike. 
Yes, it is true. Go to Nazareth: what do you 
find ? That hidden life, that sweet humility, that 
patient labor. The hills encircle Nazareth. Along 
the slope and in the valley sleeps the little town. 
The sea spreads out beyond in splendor. The sun 
shines gloriously above those mountain peaks, once 
almost the scene, prematurely, of the Passion. In 
that still spot for thirty years He lived. Man’s 
greatness is in a life of love and goodness 
hidden with God. Yes, “ the Representative of 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. W. J. Knox Little, of England. 

102 


THE SOUL’S HEED AHD GOD’s HATURE. 103 

humanity.” Go to Samaria, to Galilee, to the Lake 
shore ; see His work, the toil of His poverty ; those 
Judaean waysides, those dusty roads, those sun- 
smitten plains; and then the “ contradiction of 
sinners against Himself,” those crowded gatherings, 
those unbelieving Pharisees; those cynical, critical 
Sadducees; those blind Jews in the synagogues 
who refused Him; their carping, arguing tricki¬ 
nesses, pettinesses, jealousies, and plots. And He! 
He- never, never varied in that heavenly teaching ; 
never, never changed in that unspeakable compas¬ 
sion ; never, never faltered in that unshaken faith¬ 
fulness ; never failed a hair’s breadth in that sublime 
example; never flagged a moment in that unutter¬ 
able love. 

“ Representative of humanity ” ? Yes. Go to 
•Calvary. Every sin-smitten, heart-broken, sorrow¬ 
laden creature believing in Jesus knows Calvary. 
Every miserable one with burning brow, in palpi¬ 
tating pain, believing in Jesus, knows Calvary. 
Survey the tragedy of the Passion. And in every 
stage, in every scene, this —if you have eye to 
see, you see it— this is true. He is “the Repre¬ 
sentative of humanity.” 

Well, I am sorely needing a friend to meet the 
wants of my humanity, my individuality; that is, 
alas ! my sin. Does the Father in heaven deliver me 
from that f I may hope, suspect it, but I need to 
know. Ho human eye has ever seen Him. Ho 
hand has ever touched. Ho head has dared to lie 
upon that breast. Can He be revealed to me, as I 
need such revelation ? Can my want be met, my 


104 THE SOUL’S NEED AND GOD’S NATURE. 

individual sin pardoned, cleansed ? One only has 
ever attempted to answer that. But He has an¬ 
swered it in no uncertain accents. He ? It is 
Jesus Christ. 

One of the greatest living thinkers told me an 
anecdote, and to-night I tell it you. It illustrates 
this truth. Charles Lamb—so he told me—had met 
some friends to talk on literary topics. They were 
engaged in discussing what would be the probable 
effect upon themselves, and their demeanor, effect 
of joy, of surprise, of teaching, if they could only 
once speak mouth to mouth with the great, the 
wonderful dead; and one imagined the approach 
of one, and another of another. Then followed 
something of this sort. “Think,” said one, “if 
Dante were to enter the room, what should we do ? 
How should we meet the man who had trodden the 
fiery pavement of the Inferno, whose eyes had 
pierced the twilight, and breathed the still clear air 
of the mount of the Purgatorio, whose mind had 
contemplated the mysteries of glory in the highest 
heaven ? ” “ Or suppose Shakespeare were to 

come,” another said—you know how Lamb loved 
Shakespeare—“ Ah,” he joined in, his whole face 
brightening, “ How we should rise to meet him! 
How I should fling my arms up ! How we should 
welcome him —that king of thoughtful men! ” 
“And suppose,” said another, “Christ were to 
enter.” The whole face and attitude, so my in¬ 
formant told me, of Charles Lamb was in an instant 
changed. “ Of course,” he said, in a tone of deep 
solemnity, “of course we should fall upon our 


THE SOULES NEED AND G0D*8 NATURE. 105 

knees.” My brothers, will you care to fall upon 
your knees to one who is merely a “ Eepresentative 
of humanity ” ? I think you will rise to receive 
Him, I think you will hold out your hands and wel¬ 
come Him ; but you fall upon your knees,—and of 
course you would, if Christ were to enter—you do 
it because your “ soul is athirst for God— for the 
living God ”—and He is there. 

One further phase of desire for a moment I pro¬ 
ceed to mark. We desire forgiveness ; we have it 
is the Cross of Christ. But surely there is within 
us a yearning that the life of Christ may be ours. 
We want to know the Father as Christ revealed 
Him when Ho lived in this low world. We want 
to love the Father as Christ loved Him—to 
love Him by loving Jesus Christ—we want the 
life of Christ to permeate our own. What is 
this longing ? It is the ambition to be better, the 
desire toward the ideal, the cry for holiness. Is 
there a power to answer to that cry ? Is holiness, is 
the achievement of a higher, better, nobler life pos¬ 
sible to man ? The world smiles and says, “ in¬ 
fatuation ”; our sloth or our despondency reecho, 
“Alas! it may not be; we cannot conquer sin.” 
My brother, believe it not; you can. Not indeed 
alone, but there is a power answering your need. 
“ No man can say that Jesus is the Christ, but by 
the Holy Ghost.” Christ may be amongst us, in 
us, by the work of the Holy Ghost. 

If you are like Jesus Christ, your life is worth 
the living. And if He be, as He is, “ the Repre¬ 
sentative Man,” then, O man! you and I should 


106 THE SOUL*S NEED AND GOD’S NATURE. 

strive to be like Him. Day by day we should be 
growing toward conformity to that likeness, 
“carrying in our hearts the image of Jesus cruci¬ 
fied,” understanding that not physical prowess, nor 
mental power, but only self-sacrificing love, is that 
which makes the creature morally akin to the 
Creator. Hay more. Hot understanding only, 
but gaining in your own soul the power of the fact. 
How can you gain it ? How know it ? Where 
learn it ? Could I teach it you by ten thousand 
words? Could the most practiced subtlety un¬ 
fold it ? Can the richest stores of thought accumu¬ 
lated in the modern world supply it? Ho. The 
power is from above. Breathe, O breathe, Blessed 
Spirit upon the fainting souls of men ! Breathe, O 
breathe, on our dead respectability ! Breathe, O 
breathe, on our chilling worldliness! Breathe, O 
breathe, upon our cold religionism! Spirit of God, 
Thou who didst meet us and possess us at the font 
of Baptism, meet us when we work, meet us when 
we pray, meet us when we take the sacrament, pre¬ 
pare us, support us, unite us to the incarnate life of 
Jesus! 


XVIII. 


Fourth Week—Tuesday—the Eighteenth Day 
of Lent. 

How We are Trained by the Church . 1 

“ As he reasoned of Righteousness.”— Acts xxiv. 25. 

We are placed in the Christian Church to be 
trained in righteousness. We are taught there 
what is Truth and we are brought under the sway 
of Grace. Let us consider what are some of the 
training ideas of the Christian Church which lead 
us to righteousness. 

1. The first is the idea of Sin. Sin is, of course, 
a fact too patent in some form or other to be 
denied, but too likely in man’s untrained condition 
to be ignored or misinterpreted. The terrible evil 
which darkens and saddens human life, which 
lowers the highest yearnings, and darkens the 
fairest desires, has indeed been felt by all. When 
the Christian Apostle expressed the sad and com¬ 
mon experience,—“ To will is present with me, but 
how to do, I find not,” he knew, like others, the 
existence of an evil tendency of will, but he knew 
also, that its seriousness and danger consisted in his 
relation to his Creator, that this fatal evil was a 
missing of the mark of human existence, a failing 
in the object of life, a wasting, therefore, of 

1 From a sermon by Rev. W. J. Knox Little, of Manchester, Eng¬ 
land. 


107 


108 


TRAINED BY THE CHURCH. 


strength and power in being and in affection, that 
the Psalmist’s exclamation touched the point of 
danger, “Against thee , iliee only, have I sinned.” 
For the object of the soul is no mere notion of hu¬ 
man perfection,—some ideal state of endurance and 
self-restraint;—no, if that were all, sin would be a 
state only of inferior education as contrasted with 
complete attainment; and trouble and pain would 
really be worse than sin. As it is, life is full of 
trial and sorrow and pain; but to commit sin is the 
worst of miseries, as well as the most disastrous of 
mistakes. 

2. The second educating idea of the Christian 
Church is the Person and Character of Cod. Man 
is a person; and his personal life leads him to ex¬ 
pect a personal Creator. The Christian Church 
assures him his expectation is correct. More, the 
character of that God she puts before him as a 
training idea. That character is one of moral and 
spiritual purity and beauty, which is expressed by 
the term—Holiness. All men have felt, and 
Christians with them, a yearning for an ideal per¬ 
fection. The Christian Church teaches man that 
his yearning corresponded to a truth. How strong 
has been that yearning, what an awful sense it has 
unfolded of the great reality ! 

I remember one hot, bright day in the later 
spring, now many years ago, having entered a 
sculptor’s studio in Milan. There was an artist 
busy within. He seemed to be young, and earnest 
at his work. Pale cheeks, sunken eyes flaming out 
from his white brow,—whiter for its crown of 


TRAINED BY THE CHURCH. 


109 


black and bushy hair,—seemed to tell of a frame 
too weak for the life within it, of a body consumed 
by the fire of an intense nature. He was engaged 
upon a copy of one of the great masters. He was 
working at the head of a Christ. I looked at him 
silently, for who was I to interrupt his work or 
volunteer an opinion ? At last he broke the si¬ 
lence, as he turned upon me with feverish impa¬ 
tience, “ Speak to me, sir,” he said; “ say something; 
is it like, is it ever so little like ? ” 

Ah ! feverish heart, what an image of our higher 
nature we are yearning when at our best, toward 
the ideal. The Church of our Master has given us 
the statute that we may more closely copy it, has 
given us help in the copying; and the soul, as the 
years are advancing, is humbly longing, “ Let it be 
like, only let it be ever so little like.” 

3. To meet this the Church presents the third 
educating idea , the need and the fact of a Redeemer. 
Ages of education prepared for Him; patriarch 
gazed through darkness, prophets prophesied, 
psalmists sang; solemn rites revealed the truth in 
deep and mystic symbolism; hope flagged and then 
revived, then almost died away. God’s ways are 
slow and patient. At last He came. Came in deep 
humility. Came in wonderful love. Came, the 
one, the only one, to meet the need of man. Man’s 
moral need was this, he required help from one 
having the perfection of his own nature, fit to be at 
once his representative and his ideal. He required, 
therefore, one of a character so complete, so fault¬ 
less, that in it should be no flaw, and so many- 


110 


TKAINED BY THE CHUKCH. 


sided, so universal, that it could meet and touch 
each member of the race in every country, every 
time. One, only one, has ever dared to claim to do 
it; and His claim was calmly and unflinchingly 
advanced when He lived on earth, and has been 
maintained, without a shade of hesitation, by 
Christians ever since. He alone, of all men, ven¬ 
tured to assert His sinlessness, and His enemies and 
contemporaries did not venture to contradict Him ; 
He at this moment is cherished in the hearts of 
thousands, of millions, in every particular different 
from one another, in language, manner, tradition, 
nationality, even details of religious belief and 
practice, but alike in this, that they love and wor¬ 
ship Jesus Christ. 

But man had also a spiritual need deeper than 
any mere man could meet: he needed God. “ God 
with us ” is the language of prophecy; it is also the 
cry of the human heart. How “ with us,” and this 
terrible fact of sin so clear ? How “ with us,” and 
this awful vision of holiness so plain ? Man’s heart 
and the Christian Church alike have answered; the 
one by a vague sense, a vague desire, an indistinct 
representation ; the other by a definite statement of 
an awful fact. “ With us ” by the mystery of atone¬ 
ment for sin; God, meeting the mysterious but real 
fact, by a mysterious but real power,—that is the 
announcement of a Redeemer. Nothing short of 
God’s help will suffice. Oh weary heartaches, oh 
deep, mysterious, intricate, inexplicable troubles, 
where, where, can we find relief for them, except 
in the loving heart, the bleeding heart of God ? 


XIX. 


Fourth Week—Wednesday—the Nineteenth 
Day of Lent. 

Agencies for the Soul’s Training . 1 

“Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.”—Ps. xxv. I. 


The Christian Church employs agencies for the 
training of the soul. The first of these is Worship. 
To worship is to concentrate mind, will and affec¬ 
tion in homage before God. On God we depend, 
from God we come, to God we go. All we have is 
His, committed to us to use according to our Mas¬ 
ter’s expressed desire. All we are is the outcome 
of Ilis bounty and generous gift, except the sin 
which defaces the image of Himself in the soul. To 
worship is to acknowledge the truth, and therefore, 
since truth is the food of the understanding, to sat¬ 
isfy one of the needs of our being. More; man’s 
perfection and happiness is God’s glory, that is, it is 
the full expression, in the life of His creature, of 
the ultimate meaning of His wisdom, goodness, and 
truth. Man’s final satisfaction will be the rapture 
of the beatific vision; all true worship is the antici¬ 
pation of that perfection; it is therefore the “ giving 
glory to God.” 

1. Worship may be expressed in song or in rapt 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. W. J. Knox Little, of Manchester, 
England. 


Ill 


112 AGENCIES FOR THE SOUL’S TRAINING. 

and concentrated silence, in voiceless homage or in 
the splendid ritual of an adoring Church, by the 
rapid chant of stately psalms, by the fair symbols of 
frescoed angels, by the upturned eye, or the uplifted 
voice, but these are the expression of the attitude 
of hearts in grace; they are the looks and accents 
of the Bride in her love for the Bridegroom. 

External acts of worship have been ever practiced 
by the Church, because they are revealed and taught 
by God. To disregard them is a serious fault, not 
only because it indicates a disobedient and wilful 
temper, but also because it assists to destroy the 
worship of the heart. Not to unite in acts of wor¬ 
ship, or not to practice postures of devotion, is, alas! 
soon to lose altogether the thing of which these are 
the signs. A religion which forgets worship soon 
forgets God and cripples spiritual growth in man. 
At best it thinks most of comfort and of self-im¬ 
provement, not of God’s glory, and in temper sinks 
into recognition of natural virtues, and ignores or 
denies the need of the high graces of supernatural 
spiritual life. And as man worships, so, by the law 
of assimilation, he grows in likeness to the immortal 
beauty. Simply to adore God is to be ennobled. 
In an age of such feverish activity and morbid de¬ 
sire of movement, we do well to remember that to 
place ourselves with the hosts of the angels, stricken 
with the holiness and awfulness of the vision of 
God, to forget self in the presence of the Lamb “as 
it had been slain,” by whom and in whom alone we 
can worship, to gaze and adore the splendor and 
goodness of the Eternal, is at once to give God the 


AGENCIES FOR THE SOUL’S TRAINING. 113 

glory we owe to Him, and ourselves to grow in 
righteousness. 

2. The second agency of the Church is prayer. 
Prayer is indeed an instinct of the soul. But we 
learn in Christianity its meaning, its duty, and its 
blessing; we learn that it is the Holy Spirit of God 
who enables, as it is the merits of the Redeemer 
which give efficacy to, our prayers. We learn that 
there is a special virtue in the union of souls in 
prayer, that whatever we ask in prayer, believing, 
we shall receive, if it be according to His will; 
and with this we may well be content, for we can 
desire nothing really contrary to that blessed Will, 
which is the highest law of the universe, and must 
be the law of our being if our end is blessedness; 
that no faithful prayer is ever lost; that by prayer 
we ascend and hold communion with the Eternal, 
“ whom to know is eternal life; ” that out of prayer 
comes what most we need in the path of our pil¬ 
grimage—consolation and strength. And it is our 
faith, that the prayers of His people are a part of 
the agencies by which God carries on His govern¬ 
ment of the world. This is all, of course, abun¬ 
dantly contradicted, as every other truth is, by the 
flippancy or blindness of unbelief. That there are 
difficulties to reason in this as in other points of 
revelation, no Christian is at pains to deny. He 
knows his reason is finite and God infinite, he knows 
in his religion he is dealing with mysteries, he is 
only astounded by the folly of those who fancy 
they can measure and criticise the infinite counsels 
of God. But of the point before us the Christian is 


114 AGENCIES FOR THE SOUL’S TRAINING. 

abundantly confident. Prayer sustains in a higher 
atmosphere a soul which would otherwise flag and 
fall; it educates (and that not merely by its subjec¬ 
tive effect, but by the power given to its urgency) 
—it educates in righteousness. Prayer has brought 
comfort and strength. That where there has been 
faithful fulfilment of the conditions laid down by 
Christ, it unfailingly does so in the long run; it has 
been the experience of many, that even amid outer 
trials, a life of prayer has been blessed with a sense 
of interior trust, entire resignation, abundance of 
peace; it has been the experience of numbers of the 
greatest and best whom the world has ever known, 
that new forces have possessed the soul, that unex¬ 
pected blessings have been received in the life, at 
times when they persisted in prayer. Without it 
the soul is dull, earthly, sickly, at last dead; with 
it, a soul is subjected to a powerful supernatural 
agency for training in righteousness. 

3. But no ascension of the soul to God is suffi¬ 
cient. There is also the mystery of the sacramental 
agency , whereby God descends to the soul. I say, 
rightly, “ God descends.” For, indeed, every life- 
giving, life-sustaining power is only a conveyance 
to us of some virtue of the Self-existent. God is 
the self-sufficing, self-possessing Life, the fountain of 
all being; and, as in natural life He uses instru¬ 
ments, so in spiritual things, in dealing with His 
creature, who is at once a spirit and a body, He has 
revealed to us that He uses sacramental veils and 
instruments, whereby to convey the sustaining 
strength of spiritual life, The sacraments of the 


AGENCIES FOE THE SOUL’S TRAINING. 115 

Church have their proper scope, and they in some 
degree or manner convey to the soul the life-giving 
life of the second Adam, whereby is applied, because 
in it dwells, the righteousness of God. 

The education of righteousness , indeed , comes to 
this , it is the growth of the soul into ever closer 
union with Jesus Christ. It is the one thing valu¬ 
able in interior life, this advance in righteousness,— 
that is, this closer contact with “ the Lord our right¬ 
eousness.” All the teachings, all the agencies of 
the Church are concentrated on effecting this in the 
soul. 

And perfect righteousness,—the “ holiness with¬ 
out which no man shall see the Lord,”—is the final 
crown of a completed character. Even here the 
saints have had a foretaste of that blessedness, 
which is the consequence of perfection of the soul 
in Him, and which is the certain reward of those 
who, by grace, persevere. As the wanderer toils 
up the rough paths of the Great St. Bernard, he 
sees on either side the signs of desolation, and above 
him the crests of eternal snow. From point to 
point fair glimpses of distant valleys open for a 
moment, and then are screened by the envious 
cliffs; the storm wraps the rocks in darkness in 
the autumn night, and blinds the traveler with the 
driving snow; even in the summer evening, only 
sparse shreds of golden sunlight wander tearfully, 
as if trespassers, in the crannies of the clefts; but 
a church bell here and there rings out the Angelus, 
and reminds him of a better hope, and of another 
world. He climbs the crest, and soon below him 


116 AGENCIES FOR THE SOUL’S TRAINING. 

lies another landscape under a fairer heaven. In¬ 
stead of toil, and struggling labor, rough rock and 
roaring torrent, lo! the calm, soft sunshine, bright 
skies and fair valleys of Italy. Christ’s pilgrim 
wanders on; he has stray lights, and sounds of 
music from another world; but a soul does grow 
with persevering faithfulness to grace; there is 
“ righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy 
Ghost,”—foretaste of the land of peace, beyond 
the gateways of the day. 

And now, my brothers, what is your life ? Sim¬ 
ply an opportunity for that training for another 
world. A being who is enabled fully, awfully, to 
recognize the greatness of the claims of God, to 
have his spiritual vision cleared by an ideal picture 
of what he is meant to be, who is placed within 
reach of power of pardon, and forces of growth,— 
such is the Christian in the Church of the Re- 
deemer, educated in righteousness. Standing as 
you are, O brother man ! on the brink of eternity, 
remember that all temporal success, all outward 
triumph, all self-satisfying display, all that can be 
gained merely by toil of brain or hand, or given 
by the favor of admirers or patrons in a passing 
world,—all is as nothing compared with that 
growth in inward conformity to God’s image, 
which is the due condition of the creature’s being 
here, the fitting result of his supernatural training, 
and which, in the Church of the Redeemer, is pos¬ 
sible for man. 


XX. 


Fourth Week—Thursday—the Twentieth Day 
of Lent. 

Who are the Good and Who are the Bad ? 1 

“The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that 
one died for all, therefore all die; and that He died for all, that they 
which live should henceforth live not unto themselves, but unto Him 
which died for them, and rose again.”—2 Cor. v. 14, 15. 

The Bible seems continually to divide people 
into two classes, the good and the bad, and to an¬ 
ticipate a sharper division finally—sheep on the 
right hand and goats on the left. But we feel 
sometimes, with this sharp division in our minds 
when we contemplate the facts of actual life, that 
they are in marked contradiction. 

There are a few exceptionally good people; a 
few people exceptionally bad; but the great multi¬ 
tude of men present, we feel, as we contemplate 
them, a very mixed appearance; nay more, as ex¬ 
perience grows, we seem continually to be disap¬ 
pointed by some meanness or sensuality or selfish¬ 
ness or worldliness appearing in those we thought 
well of, and some unexpected trait of goodness in 
those of whom we thought the worst things. More 
and more the world assumes an air of drab monot- 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Charles Gore, M. A., Canon of West¬ 
minster, London, England. 


117 


118 WHO ARE THE GOOD AND BAD ? 

ony, of mixed vice and virtue ; and what, we ask, 
has come of this marked division which the Bible 
continually presses upon us, between the good and 
the bad ? And yet, on reflection, it occurs to us 
that after all the concrete character which the 
pages of Scripture present to us are of this mixed 
character which our experience suggests—Esau and 
Jacob, Saul and David, Pilate and Peter. These 
are mixed characters which confront us in common 
life. But yet in its moral analysis the Bible sun¬ 
ders them, and puts one on the one side and the 
other on the other, and again we ask ourselves, 
What is the meaning of this division , which ap¬ 
pears in so many respects to contradict our expe¬ 
rience ? And the answer is, I suppose, a twofold 
one. It is this—first, that the Bible judges men, 
and would have us judge them, not so much by 
what they are as by the tendency of their life, by 
the direction of its moral movement. Of course 
we recognize it. The true way to judge anything 
is by the direction,—the movement that is in it, 
which, produced infinitely, will carry it very far 
indeed from its present ground. Thus, Esau is 
worse than Jacob, because though Esau had many 
elements of nobility and the other many elements 
of trickery and meanness, yet the latter grows in a 
certain steady direction. Jacob represents typically 
the old Jewish people. He grows in a certain moral 
direction; he produces fruit, and Esau, for all the 
elements of generosity in his character, grows in a 
direction which produces nothing, accomplishes 
nothing, redeems nothing, leads to nothing. 


WHO ARE THE GOOD AND BAD? 


119 


We are to judge of things by their tendencies , and 
when, turning from the outward aspect of man with 
all its mixed appearance, we look into the tribunal 
of our own conscience we are amazed to see how, 
when we look at moral action from within, this 
teaching of the Bible is justified to our minds. It 
may be a small thing—one of those things which 
makes no very great difference in our general esti¬ 
mate of a man, a small sin, or defect of character 
into which we have been betrayed. We have told, 
let us suppose, a somewhat ill-natured story about 
some one in general society. Look at that act, 
however, from within. What was it? We were 
feeling somewhat at a loss for matter of conversa¬ 
tion when we were dining with a friend, and the 
story came into our memory, and we knew it would 
raise a laugh, and we knew also that it was ill-na¬ 
tured, and yet in a moment or two we had told it. 
It is a small act, but to our moral conscience it is 
not small. We knew, if we were honest with our¬ 
selves, that what happened then was simply that 
we took the bad instead of the good. It is no com¬ 
fort to us that it was not something worse. At the 
moment, the alternative before us was to do right 
or wrong, and we chose for our convenience to do 
wrong. Life is made up of acts like that, a contin¬ 
ual choosing of the right or a continual choosing of 
the wrong, and the acts repeated in one direction 
stereotype the character; they harden it; they pro¬ 
duce a definite and almost fixed tendency, and so 
in human life—the Bible after all being justified— 
that is continually going on. 


120 WHO AKE THE GOOD AND BAD? 

People who have natural faults and natural vir¬ 
tues, who, in the outward circumstances of life are 
keeping close together, are all along, by repeated 
acts of the inner will, moving in a direction toward 
goodness or toward badness, which at some sudden 
crisis which breaks down the barriers of habitual 
circumstance may show them to be all the time in¬ 
finitely better or infinitely worse than under ordi¬ 
nary circumstances we had imagined them to be. 
The Bible, then, takes men as better or worse than 
they seem, divides us into two classes, bad or good, 
because of the inner tendency or moral direction in 
which our lives are moving. 

But yet there is another part of the answer to 
the question, Why thus the Bible divides us into 
good or bad ? It is not merely satisfied with point¬ 
ing out the tendency of our lives; it points also to 
the cause of the tendency. What produces the ten¬ 
dency toward good is, at the bottom of all things, 
the Bible says, Keligion, or the absence of that 
tendency, the absence of religion. What do I 
mean by religion ? I mean that which is in fact 
the signification of the word in its origin. Religion 
means a bond—binding, a bond by which a human 
being is bound or obliged to some Superior Unseen 
Divine Being. That, in its etymology, is the mean¬ 
ing of the word, and therein lies the fulness of its 
significance; that is, to be religious is to be under 
conscious obligation to some unseen Divine Being. 
Look at it in the pages of the Old Testament. Ask 
again why Jacob is better than Esau. It is because 
in spite of all the natural generosity which lies in 


WHO ARE THE GOOD AND BAD ? 


121 


the character of Esau he was a profane person— 
that is, one who recognizes little or no obligation 
to God—and, therefore, there is in his character no 
tendency toward moral truth, no fixity of principle, 
no moral movement. Jacob represents, on the 
other hand, with all his faults, the very spirit of 
religion—that is, the recognition of his moral obli¬ 
gation to the God of his fathers—and because he 
knows God, because he cannot forget the obligation 
by which he is bound to God, therefore gradually 
and after a lapse of time, on him and on his children 
the character of the God he worshipped is inevitably 
impressed. Religion—that makes the difference. 

I say, then, if you ask the reason why the Bible 
tends so to divide men into good or bad, to make 
us believe that we are better or worse than we ap¬ 
pear, or are apt to think one another, the answer is 
that it looks not to the actual moral level we have 
attained, but to the moral tendency and direction 
of our life. And if you ask further how we are to 
account for this difference of tendency, the answer 
is that we believe on the whole that that man tends 
upward who has religion, and that man tends 
downward who has no religion; and by religion is 
meant not this or that profession, but the recogni¬ 
tion as a moral bond of the sovereignty of God. 

And yet, brethren, when we have said and recog¬ 
nized that, it comes into our heart, surely, that here 
in this very respect is the peculiar and transcendent 
failure of our generation. In many respects no one 
can doubt our moral advance. Life is much more 
amiable, much more kindly disposed, much more 


122 WHO AKE THE GOOD AND BAD ? 

forbearing and considerate than it was. Gentler 
virtues flourish amongst us than in the generations 
that have gone before—there is no question about 
it. But on the other hand is it possible to look 
around on the classes and society which we know 
best, and doubt that there is very generally a weak¬ 
ening of that sense of constraint, that sense of obli¬ 
gation to a Higher Power, to God, whether from 
love or fear ? There is a more or less refined sel¬ 
fishness which in different forms we recognize con¬ 
tinually in human lives, which owns no master at 
the last resort but its own convenience. There is a 
more or less refined and educated aestheticism which 
will have no restraint but its own taste or sense of 
what is beautiful. There is an educated or self- 
conscious scepticism which shakes off the first feel¬ 
ing of pressure in moral obligation by Pilate’s ques¬ 
tion. “ What is truth ? ” I ask you to look around 
the society you live in, the people you ordinarily 
talk to, and say what tone of the mind you meet in 
society, in business. Am I exaggerating when I 
say that that which is weakening is that sense of 
positive constraint, that sense of positive obligation, 
whether of love or fear to a God whom in any case 
we must recognize ? Does religion lay its strong 
hand on selfishness when selfishness is considering 
its own convenience? on aestheticism when it is 
considering its taste ? on scepticism when it is shak¬ 
ing off the sense of moral obligation by the appeal 
to the uncertainty of argument ? To be religious 
is to be under conscious obligation to the unseen 
Divine Being. Are we thus living ? 


XXL 


Fourth Week—Friday—the Twenty-first Day of 
Lent. 

How can the Sense of Religion be Strengthened ? 1 

“ The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that 
one died for all, therefore all died; and that He died for all, that they 
which live should henceforth live not unto themselves, but unto Him 
which died for them, and rose again.”—2 Cor. v. 14, 15. 

There is not in the page of history, there is not 
in the experience of men anything like the spectacle 
of the cross and Passion of onr Lord, which has 
such a power to lay upon the soul or to strengthen 
upon it the sense of religion, that consciousness of 
obligation and constraint. We watch the Son of 
Man going to His Passion ; we know what it means. 
He is going because He represents all that in our 
inmost conscience we know to be best. He had 
moved out into the world because of the Word of 
truth, of righteousness. It was because He was per¬ 
fected that He went out thus to die. They, under 
the circumstances of the time, put Him to death ; 
but what is more important, for it is irrespective of 
the conditions in their consciences, they rejected 
Him, and repudiated Him, men, ordinary men, such 
as we are, only because He did represent these 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Charles Gore, M. A., Canon of Westmin¬ 
ster, London, England. 


123 


124 SENSE OF RELIGION BE STRENGTHENED? 

things which in our best moments we admire. 
That is true! You have only to look at the cir¬ 
cumstances with more exactitude to see that the 
classes which repudiated Him represented in their 
time and under their circumstances the ordinary 
habitual moral tendencies of men. The Sadducees 
were not anything more than worldly men like all 
other worldly men, occupied with a policy, and at 
the last resort caring for the situation which their 
policy involved more than abstract justice and 
truth. “The Romans will come and take' our 
place ”—that was the final and sufficient answer to 
the appeal of justice. These Pharisees were not 
more than men of ingrained religious prejudice, 
who had religious reputation to maintain, and who 
were not prepared to risk their religious reputation 
and position by beginning to ask themselves over 
again the first question about religion altogether. 
And the crowd was not more fickle and shallow 
than people commonly are who want religion, but 
not a religion which will give them any moral 
trouble. And Pilate was not more than ordinarily 
weak under the strains under which multitudes, 
aye, even the majority of men are seen to fail. It 
was the ordinary worldly world, the world which 
lies round about us in the streets on which we 
jostle, which is broad and large as human society 
itself, when it will not put God first. It was ordi¬ 
nary men , then, who put Christ to death. He died 
at the hands of men because He was righteous, and 
not only at the hands of men, but for men. He 
moves out into the struggle, into the battle, con- 


SENSE OF RELIGION BE STRENGTHENED? 125 

sciously and deliberately, carrying through for men 
that ideal which He knows to be the only one by 
which humanity can finally be saved. He went to 
die for men knowing that He was representing all 
that was true in manhood against all that was false. 
He knew it was a sacrifice, a deliberate sacrifice of 
Himself for all that is best in manhood. And there¬ 
fore it is that He laid upon our consciences, our 
will, a constraint, an allegiance, than which noth¬ 
ing can be stronger, if only we will suffer ourselves 
steadily for a while to contemplate the meaning of 
that scene— u The love of Christ constraineth us.” 
Jesus carried that ideal through death into glory ; 
He lives at the right hand of the Father in the 
glory of God, but still human. He has sent down 
His Spirit into our hearts one by one; that Spirit is 
moving in our conscience. How as we look at His 
cross and passion, their value for us depends upon 
the deepening of religion in us. 

Some of you have at some time or other in your 
life been visitors to Florence, and in Florence to 
the convent of San Marco. There, you know in 
cell after cell there are depicted upon the wall the 
scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus by the brush of 
that poet-painter-preacher, Fra Angelico. The 
painter has seemed to feel that the figure of Jesus 
crucified was more than he could compass; he has 
left it most conventionally treated. All the depth 
of his power he has put into the figure of St Domi¬ 
nic, who stands at the cross representing the Chris¬ 
tian soul in all the various phases of feeling which 
pass over it, as it contemplates the spectacle of 


126 SENSE OF RELIGION BE STRENGTHENED? 

Jesus crucified. First, there is the mere bewilder¬ 
ment as of one who contemplates a sight shocking 
and horrible, and he hides his face in horror, as 
from something disgraceful. You pass into another 
cell, and the scene is changed. Now he is looking- 
up in questioning bewilderment; he has not yet 
taken in the meaning of the scene, but he is sure 
that there are hidden there depths of misery and 
truth. You pass to another cell, and now he has 
understood what it is. He has seen in Jesus One 
who is suffering for human sin; he is determined 
that he will not share those sins, he feels there in a 
penitence, which is represented by the scourge at 
the foot of the cross. You pass into another, and 
now he has found the joy and the repose of that 
forgiveness which passes out of the loving heart of 
Christ. He kneels there, he contemplates in ecstasy 
Jesus who has forgiven him. Once more. Alone 
he is standing, with his arms outstretched, as one 
who simply contemplates in admiration the glory 
of that great love for all the world which beams 
from the cross. Once more he is kneeling there, 
kneeling on one knee, as one who had prepared to 
start up; he is there half in homage, half in recog¬ 
nition that this cross lays upon his life the alle¬ 
giance of a great service; he is grasping it as one 
who is just leaving for his mission. 

Brethren, whatever phases and feelings we pass 
through, as we contemplate the cross of Christ, this 
is what it must come to. The value of the cross for 
us depends upon the extent to which it creates or 
deepens in us that one ultimate feeling of religion. 


SENSE OF RELIGION BE STRENGTHENED? 127 

that obligation, that bond, that allegiance of the 
human soul to something which, with all its being, 
it can adore and serve. “ Because we thus judge 
that if one died, then all die.” What does it mean ? 
It means He died for this ordinary world, that this 
world laid its hand upon Him and put Him to 
death; then if we believe that, then never more 
can we walk at ease in the ways of the world that 
rejected and crucified Jesus. 

He died for all; therefore, when the meaning of 
that spectacle has been taken in by our conscience 
and our heart, we die for the world that crucified 
Him ; we cannot take part in its ways or be satis¬ 
fied with its standards, or adapt our consciences to 
its methods, or let ourselves off because the world 
lets us off. 

I ask you with resolute fearlessness to yield your¬ 
selves to the influence, the plain and simple moral 
influence, which flows down upon the will and heart 
of any one who will yield himself to contemplate 
the cross of Jesus, and to take in, as all can take in, 
the meaning of living in the world which rejected 
Him and crucified Him. Only look at Jesus of 
Nazareth, and you cannot fail to see in Him the 
One who constrains and compels the moral homage 
of your conscience and will, and it is in giving to 
Him the moral homage which His human perfec¬ 
tion claims that at least you put yourself on the 
road to a further understanding of His claim and 
to the nature of it. Only give yourself to take in 
the meaning of what He professed, of what He suf¬ 
fered, of what He represented—Jesus dead at the 


128 SENSE OF RELIGION BE STRENGTHENED? 

hands of men and for men; Jesus risen, your King 
and Master; Jesus laying on your souls by all the 
claims of His sacrifice and His suffering a hand of 
strong mastery, a hand of religion. For to be able 
to say, “ I am Thy servant,” to be able to say “ In 
all my weaknesses and in spite of my innumerable 
faults and temptations I do serve Thee ; the love of 
Christ constraineth me,”—that is to have impressed 
and implanted on your conscience and your will a 
motive and a power which throughout all weak¬ 
nesses shall continually recover and restore and re¬ 
call you. 


XXII. 


Fourth Week—Saturday—the Twenty-second 
Day of Lent. 

A Warning Lest We Lose What We Have . 1 

“ Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abun¬ 
dance ; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that 
which he hath.” — St. Matthew xxv. 29 . 

In whatever direction we turn we find the truth 
of this saying of our Lord exemplified in some 
form. From him that hath not is always being 
taken, even that which he hath; while more is be¬ 
ing given to him that hath. It may seem to some 
an unjust law. Yet it is reiterated several times 
by Christ and appears to obtain His sanction. Is 
there, then, any justification for the existence of 
such conditions ? Has this law, if law it be, any 
moral purpose ? Is there any righteous intention 
actuating it, or hidden behind it ? It may help us 
to approach the answer and to appreciate it more 
fully if we consider how Nature acts under similar 
circumstances. The weak are crushed out; the 
hardy are preserved. The indolent and awkward 
are deprived .of any powers they may have, while 
the powers of the active and skilful are increased 
and elaborated. Older and inferior kinds of ani- 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Lionel J. Wallace, M. A., Vicar of 
Goring, England. 


129 


130 LEST WE LOSE WHAT WE HAVE. 

mals and plants are pressed out of existence by 
newer and superior kinds. With man similar proc¬ 
esses go on. The races which are satisfied to stand 
still, and will not be taught, disappear. If the in¬ 
dividual man is too foolish or indolent to employ 
any of his faculties, these faculties lose their force ; 
just as the arm never raised shrinks into impotence, 
and the brain never seriously exerted forfeits its 
power of remembering and thinking. On the other 
hand, the strong, active, and capable become, under 
the operation of this law, more strong, more active, 
and more capable. The power used increases in 
efficiency, and gains new powers for its possessor. 
The races of men which are earnest to move for¬ 
ward and willing to endure become, as a rule, the 
dominant races. The man who exerts, within 
proper limits, body and mind, finds the powers of 
both grow larger and more reliable. 

In consideration of these results do we not begin 
to find an answer to our question, and to see a 
justification for conditions which, on a hasty 
glance, appear so hard ? From him who has little 
is taken even the little he has; to him who has 
much is given more. But why ? Clearly, on the 
whole, no capricious or reasonless course of treat¬ 
ment is pursued. The first loses, either because he 
has never made an honest effort, or has never had 
the skill to make a well-directed effort, to use 
whatever little he had. Like the slothful servant 
in the parable, he puts away his talent where it is 
of no value to himself, or to any one else ; and, so, 
it is taken from him. The second gains because 


LEST WE LOSE WHAT WE HAVE. 


131 


he has employed whatever powers he received and, 
in this measure, has deserved to have those powers 
and gifts increased. There is, then, a principle of 
desert involved in the matter. The law, so far, is 
not without justification, nor is its action needlessly 
or unreasonably cruel. Even where the action 
takes place in a purely physical sphere a moral les¬ 
son is conveyed. Indolence, wastefulness, apathy 
are condemned ; industry, wise carefulness, strenu¬ 
ousness, are pronounced good. 

But there is also a judicial aspect. “ Take from 
him.” “ Give to him.” Not only is the moral les¬ 
son implied in general, but we find, under this law, 
the waster and idler punished for a crime, while 
the worker is rewarded for his merit. The man 
who cannot, or will not work, must yield to the 
man who can and will. This is not the community’s 
decree alone—it is God’s decree as well. For what 
is that great natural law, the law of the survival of 
the fittest, but another form of the declaration, 
“Unto every one that hath shall be given; and 
from him that hath not shall be taken away even 
that which he hath”? The weak, the worthless, 
the unfruitful animal or plant, is, with apparent 
ruthlessness, swept away, and its place is given to 
the capable and fruitful. The unfit has had its 
chance, but its unfitness having been conclusively 
proved, it may not be permitted to cumber the 
ground any longer, but must give place to the fit 
and profitable. 

For the moral world the same law holds good. 
It may not appear to act in the moral world with 


132 LEST WE LOSE WHAT WE HAVE. 

the same undeviating rigor and impartiality that 
it does in the physical world, but of the fact of its 
rule there can be little doubt. Even in what is 
commonly called society, amid much that is invidi¬ 
ous and sordid, we can trace a moving under this 
law, and recognize that often—perhaps in spite of 
itself—society is exercising a rude kind of justice. 
That larger world, of which society is an infinitesi¬ 
mal part, must live, if it is to live at all, under the 
reign of this same law. The world cannot stand 
still; it must dwindle and become worse, or it must 
grow and become better. It is God’s will that it 
should grow, but it cannot grow if it is crowded 
with the helpless and idle people; if talents, need¬ 
ful to its growth, lie rusting in the possession of the 
falsely prudent or incompetent. It can grow and 
become better only by the exertions of the thinker 
and the worker, by talents and powers in the hands 
of the brave and competent. There is no place for 
the skulker. Possessions—moral, mental or material 
—are given to be used for the good of the world ; if 
they are selfishly hoarded, or allowed to lie idle, the 
right to them is forfeited. They are held by the 
tenure of service, and from those who cease to serve 
they ought to be taken, and given to those who 
will serve. 

In religion the law obtains. If we are satisfied 
with a mere lip and knee worship, if the main part 
of our religion consists in words, if we are too in¬ 
dolent to work our creed into our doing, and to 
make our lives square with our profession, if we re¬ 
fuse to acknowledge the impulse and prompting of 


LEST WE LOSE WHAT WE HAVE. 133 

the spirit, then we are likely to end by losing all 
true religion. We have had little, yet that little 
may become much, but, if we are too indolent and 
careless to try to realize and use our little, we may 
lose even that little. There is no place for the 
slothful, feeble, and infirm of purpose. God and 
the world demand work, and claim that each man 
use diligently the powers committed to him. If he 
do this he will find that every power increases by 
being used , and that the more a man does and gains 
the more capable he becomes of doing and gaining. 
This will be the faithful servant’s immediate re¬ 
ward. Beyond this, a greater reward will await 
him in the knowledge that through his service the 
world has grown somewhat better, has risen a little 
nearer to the ideal to which it should always tend; 
and that, through his true work, however limited 
and restricted it may have been, mankind has be¬ 
come, in some small degree, happier, purer, and 
holier. In eloquent and forceful words Mr. John 
Morley urges such considerations as these. “ What 
we can do—the humblest of us—is by diligently 
using our own minds, and diligently seeking to 
extend our own opportunities to others, to help 
to swell that common tide, on the force and set 
of whose currents depends the prosperous voyag¬ 
ing of humanity. When our names are blotted 
out, and our place knows us no more, the 
energy of each social service will remain, and so, 
too, let us not forget, will each social disservice re¬ 
main, like the unending stream of one of nature’s 
forces. The thought that this is so may well 


134 LEST WE LOSE WHAT WE HAVE. 

lighten the poor perplexities of our daily life, and 
even soothe the pang of its calamities; it lifts us 
from our feet as on wings, opening a larger meaning 
to our private toil, and a higher purpose to our 
public endeavor; it makes the morning as we awake 
to its welcome, and the evening like a soft garment 
as it wraps us round; it nerves our arm with bold¬ 
ness against oppression and injustice, and strength¬ 
ens our voice with deeper accents against falsehood, 
while we are yet in the full noon of our days—yes, 
and, perhaps, it will show some ray of consolation, 
when our eyes are growing dim to it all, and we go 
down into the Valley of Darkness.” It will do 
more. For, while to the slothful servant a dreadful 
word comes—“ Take from him even that which he 
hath ”—and the darkness deepens at the uttering of 
that word; in him who has been true and used his 
talent diligently in the service of God and of man¬ 
kind, it will so move that he will hear a Voice: 
“Well done, good and faithful servant; thou has 
been faithful over a few things, I will make thee 
ruler over many things ; enter thou into the joy of 
thy Lord.” And at that Voice the shadows will 
roll away, and the Dark Valley be penetrated by 
the light of God. 


XXIII. 


Fifth Week—Monday—the Twenty-third Day 
of Lent. 

Prayer is Reasonable . 1 

“ He that planted the ear, shall He not hear ? ”—Ps. xciv. 9 . 

Can God listen to and answer Prayer? Will 
God listen to and answer Prayer ? Ought God to 
listen to and answer Prayer ? Three points, you 
notice, are involved—ability, disposition, right. 

We are often told that it argues a downright 
puerility to suppose that God either can or will an¬ 
swer our requests, because Nature is clearly and be¬ 
yond all question an intricately contrived machine, 
no more able to alter its motions and change its 
bearings in compliance with a spoken word or re¬ 
quest, than a steam engine or a clock or a loom. 
This would be an unanswerable argument in favor 
of fatalism, and against the potency of prayer, were 
Nature a machine of which we could see the whole, 
but it is not. There is a background of mystery, a 
region none of our senses can penetrate, and there, 
wholly out of sight, lie the beginnings of power. It 
may be that behind the veil which sunders the seen 

1 From a sermon by Rev. W. R. Huntington, D.D., Rector of Grace 
Church, New York. From “ The Causes of the Soul,” published by 
E. P. Dutton & Company, New York. 


135 


136 


PRAYER IS REASONABLE. 


from the unseen, the hand which keeps the wheel- 
work all in motion, is turned this way rather than 
that, or that way rather than this, because two or 
three believing souls have agreed on earth touching 
some blessing they desire to have, some work they 
would see done. It may be so, may it not ? The 
Almighty is able to hear, and both able and willing 
to answer prayer. 

There remains the question, Ought He always and 
invariably to answer it , in the sense of never refus¬ 
ing to any petitioner any earnest request ? To this 
a sober-minded faith will assuredly answer, No. 
Fatherhood involves governance, and governance 
involves the exercise of judgment, discrimination. 
The life of a well-ordered family is full of what we 
may call earthly prayer. The children ask the par¬ 
ents questions of many sorts, and bring to them re¬ 
quests of widely variant character; is it any argu¬ 
ment against the efficacy of this which I have called 
earthly prayer, that some of the questions go unan¬ 
swered, and not a few of the requests ungranted ? 
No, the father remembers what his responsibility 
with respect to the whole family is, and certain of 
the favors the children ask he grants not, because 
he ought not. And yet, who will deny that in the 
life of that household the right of petition is a real 
thing, or that the exercise of it produces real results ? 
So with our Father in heaven and His family on 
earth. All of our prayers He hears, not one escapes 
Him. Our adoration He receives, our thanksgivings 
He graciously accepts, to our confessions He lends 
an ear of pity, and as for our requests, some He 


PRAYER IS REASONABLE. 


137 


grants, and some He disallows. Is He the less our 
Father then for that ? Ho, not the less, the more. 
Possibly in the clearer light of the heavenly life, 
should it be granted us to enter there, we shall find 
ourselves thanking Him with greater fervency for 
withholding our heart’s desire, than we could pos¬ 
sibly have thanked Him for conceding it. 

Moreover, God forbid that we should confine our 
definition of prayer to the men begging for favors. 
Prayer is more than petition . It is communion , 
intercourse , exchange of confidences. 

It is written of Moses, the man of God, that the 
Lord spake unto him face to face, “ as a man speak- 
eth to his friend.” What more beautiful picture of 
heaven brought down to earth, could be imagined ? 
The confiding to God the whole story of our trou¬ 
bles, of our disappointments, of our failures, of our 
well-meant endeavors, and last, not least, of our 
sins,—is there nothing of value in all this that we 
should leave it wholly out of view in estimating the 
efficacy of prayer ? 

Or again, think of how much a grateful heart has 
to tell. Is it nothing that the soul should have the 
opportunity given her to pour out before her Maker 
a glad offering of thanks ? Is it nothing that the 
joy which Nature, in her more genial moods, some¬ 
times inspires in us should be able to find expression 
in acts of heartfelt adoration to Him whom even 
Nature herself blindly worships? Is it nothing 
that all the kindly affections and associations of our 
homes can be lifted up and carried on the lips of 
household prayer until they come into the presence 


138 


PRAYER IS REASONABLE. 


of the Father of all the families of the earth and 
taste the preciousness of His blessing ? 

Are all these phases of prayer, all these modes of 
speaking with God, to be carelessly set aside as of 
no particular value, while the whole question is 
made one of mendicancy, and we are asked to meas¬ 
ure the advantages according to the arithmetic by 
which a street beggar reckons up his gains at sun¬ 
set. 

Intercourse with a character richer and better than 
our own is commonly held to be a great privilege. 
We can all of us recall friends to whom we have, as 
we say, owed a great deal on the score of helpful 
influence. But is it supposable that God has per¬ 
mitted personal intercourse between man and man 
to be such a potent instrument in the building up 
of character, and yet has made all intercourse with 
Himself impossible? If the spirit of man can, 
through the power of influence and sympathy, bless 
and uplift the spirit of his fellow-man, much more, 
a thousandfold more, shall God, who, be it remem¬ 
bered, is a Spirit also, aid by intercourse and influ¬ 
ence the creature spirit whom He permits to call 
himself His child. Wherefore, my brethren, let us 
pray. 


XXIV. 


Fifth Week—Tuesday—the Twenty-fourth Day 
of Lent. 

Prayer is not Contrary to Nature . 1 

What is the use of Prayer after all? is there 
any good in prayer ? Is there any reality in it ? 
Are we indeed speaking into the ear of God, or 
simply articulating into the air ? Does the Lord Al¬ 
mighty hear our prayer, and will He answer ? Or 
are we simply repeating and mumbling pious words 
and phrases because we have been taught to do so, 
whose only response is their echo, and not even 
that? 

There are tendencies which seem to militate 
against the reality of prayer. Most of them might 
be summarized in some such statement or objection 
as this: Nature being uniform in its working, 
effect following cause there with an unerring regu¬ 
larity of sequence and occurrence, prayer is an exer¬ 
cise contrary to the law of nature. But that, it 
seems to me, is exactly what it is not. Prayer con¬ 
trary to the laws of nature ? What nature ? 
Whose nature? It is not contrary to my nature. 

1 From a chapter in “ The Preacher and His Place,” a volume of ad¬ 
dresses by the Rev. David H. Greer, D. D., Rector of St. Bartholo¬ 
mew’s Church, New York. Copyright 1895 , and Published by Charles 
Scribner’s Sons. 


139 


140 PRAYER IS NOT CONTRARY TO NATURE. 


It is not contrary to your nature. It is not con¬ 
trary to human nature in general , for in all ages 
men have prayed; and, judging the future by the 
past, as long as human nature remains human na¬ 
ture they will continue to pray. It is the one 
thing, indeed, which everywhere we see, which 
everywhere we hear,—prayer : in all lands, among 
all peoples, in all conditions of life, among all sorts 
of men, in all the past we hear it. In the song of 
the Parsee priest on the top of the Persian moun¬ 
tains ; in the sound of the Mussulman’s cry, break¬ 
ing forth with the sunrise from the turret stone of 
the mosque; in Mohammedanism ; in Buddhism ; 
in Zoroasterism ; in the monotheism of the Jew ; 
in the militarism of the Koman; in the fetichism 
of the African,—the voice of prayer is heard. And 
the spirit of prayer is felt breathing through the 
hymns to Indra and Varuna, as well as through the 
Psalms of David to Jehovah. 

What is the story of human life in the past but 
the story of religion f And if of religion , then of 
prayer . It is the story of human life trying to 
come to itself through a power outside of itself; 
and to somehow tell itself, its deepest, inmost, 
secretest self, into the listening ear of some sym¬ 
pathetic God. And not only in the story of the 
past do we hear it, in the story of the present 
we hear it. The voice of prayer is heard in 
all the lands to-day; among all the people to¬ 
day ; not only among the people who call them¬ 
selves religious, but among the people who do not 
call themselves religious, who yet, in spite of them- 


PRAYER IS NOT CONTRARY TO NATURE. 141 

selves, are a little religious at times. They cannot 
keep God out of their thought. They cannot keep 
God out of their speech. The instinct of God is in 
them, and they cannot get rid of it. And that in¬ 
stinct of God which is in them carries with it the 
instinct to appeal at times to God. And they do 
appeal to God; not always reverently, sometimes 
profanely, using His name as a name with which to 
curse and swear. But what is cursing and swear¬ 
ing but the instinct in them of prayer, of appeal to 
God, gone mad, because they have gone mad and 
angry for a moment; the instinct in them of prayer 
blasphemously expressed. It is an irrepressible, an 
ineradicable instinct. It shows itself in wrath, in 
anger, in love, in fear, in danger, in death, in the 
sudden escape from danger, in the sudden exemp¬ 
tion from death, when involuntarily they are moved 
to say and can’t help saying, “ Thank God ! ” as 
though, somehow, He did it, and they feel and 
know He did it. Or, when touched with some 
emotion beyond the common want, of gladness or 
of joy, which they know not how to express or how 
to others to tell it, or how with others to share it, 
the heart goes up to God as though it would share 
it with Him, and would say to Him, “ Oh, see, as 
no one else can see, my gladness and my joy ! ” Or 
when in some hour of need, confronting some diffi¬ 
cult or perilous task which they have not strength 
or energy to perform, and yet which they must 
perform, without any human guidance and without 
any human aid, treading the winepress all alone in 
darkness and in weariness, with none to help or 


142 PRAYER IS NOT CONTRARY TO NATURE. 

understand, or bring deliverance to them, and the 
cry goes up to God for help, and the appeal to God 
is made! 

Prayer contrary to the laws of nature ? Why 
it is a law of nature , of human nature at least , 
which lives, and breathes, and moves, and has its 
being in prayer; which is forever, reverently or 
irreverently, sacredly or profanely, silently or 
vocally, somehow appealing to God; swearing in 
His name, protesting in His name, testifying in His 
name, deprecating, imprecating, expostulating in 
His name; forever carrying up its great case in 
equity to God as unto its highest and ultimate 
Court. 

Contrary to the laws of nature? Why, more 
than anything else it is our nature. It ripples 
through all our laughter, which is in its last 
analysis but the breaking forth for a moment of 
the imprisoned spirit trying to reach and touch the 
glad surprise of some unknown life. It ripples 
through all our laughter, it shines through all our 
tears; it shows itself in our weaknesses, makes 
stronger our strengths, and quickens within us the 
dream of some ideal life, not seen as yet, but be¬ 
lieved in, toward which we now press on, toward 
which we now aspire as the home of the soul in 
God. In human nature, at least, I say, there is no 
other law so imperiously dominant, so supremely 
transcendent, so universally prevalent as the in¬ 
stinct in us of prayer; and we can no more get rid 
of it than human nature can get rid of human na¬ 
ture. 


PRAYER IS NOT CONTRARY TO NATURE. 143 


And upon that world of human nature, which is 
said to have come out of all the rest of nature, to 
be its blossomed outgrowth,—upon that world of 
human nature, with the instinct in it of prayer, we 
take our stand and pray, and leave results to Him 
who is greater and wiser that we, and who has 
made it a law of our being, a law of nature, to 
pray. 

I want you to feel how right, how reasonable, is 
prayer; and that you are not turning away from 
the light of nature as modern knowledge reveals it 
to you when you turn toward the light of Christ. 
I would deepen in you the conviction that it is only 
by the opening up of your heart and soul, not only 
toward the human, but toward the divine environ¬ 
ment of your lives, that you can reach the full 
stature of your personal development and make the 
most of yourselves. Let God make you strong, 
and then you are strong with a strength that will 
prove itself so often to be an invincible strength, 
and which opposition and difficulty will only more 
fully bring out. • 


XXV. 


Fifth W eek—W ednesday—the T wenty-fifth 

Day of Lent. 

Idleness . 1 

“ And about the eleventh hour He went out and found others idle, 
and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle ? They say 
unto Him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye 
alsor into the vineyard and whatsoever is right that shall ye receive." 
—St. Matthew xx. 6, 7. 

Our parable carries us from the industrial to the 
spiritual market. It is the work of the Kingdom 
of God of which it speaks; and it is there that the 
parable asks, “ Why idle ? ” It is idleness that 
seems so strange. Idleness, mere unmitigated 
slackness, is the inexplicable thing. It defeats 
the very motive with which man exists at all. It 
makes mock of God’s effort in creating him. The 
man is there with all his capacities, and yet might 
just as well not be there at all. His sum of powers 
counts for nothing. He is a negation, a waste. 
There is nothing to be made of it. 

How can a man remain all the day idle when the 
work of God’s vineyard goes forward so keenly ? 

Life is intended, as we say, for probation, it 
tests a man’s worth, it estimates his value, it sets 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. H. Scott Holland, M, A., Canon of 
St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England. 

144 


IDLENESS. 


145 


a hall-mark on his power, it weighs and measures 
his force of character, it allots him his place among 
his fellows. But all this can only be done if he 
will submit himself to some strain upon will and 
skill. Without this there is no evidence to go upon 
as to what he is or what he can achieve. He must 
have some fair task set him, or else he is never 
sifted, never qualified, never brought to trial. This 
is the curse of idleness—that it wrecks the primary 
intention with which a man is alive, and robs life 
of its purpose. The man who has no real work has 
missed his mark as a man, and that is why it is so 
melancholy to look round to-day and see the swarms 
of men, who even though they have escaped the 
disastrous doom of having nothing to do for their 
living, and are set to work—perhaps to hard, grind¬ 
ing work—to earn their daily bread; yet in all 
their highest manhood, in reason, in imagination, 
in spirit, have found no work required of them—no 
good cause to which they can surrender themselves, 
no blessed work for God’s glory or for man’s wel¬ 
fare that they care to undertake. In this moral or 
spiritual region of their life they are idle. Idle be¬ 
cause perhaps they are too exhausted by their labor 
for their livelihood to have any energy to put in 
this higher work of the soul. Idle, perhaps, because 
the mere dulness of their professional routine has 
closed in upon them, and has shut them up as in a 
prison-house, and they have lost the capacity to be 
stirred by any call to work with their imagination 
or their social will, and cannot believe that such 
work is to be done, or has any real significance or 


146 


IDLENESS. 


any prospect of achievement. Their profession ap¬ 
peals purely to their lower and most commonplace 
motives. The work is done more or less mechanic¬ 
ally ; it has no positive attractions; it is a necessity 
in order to live; its end is to escape from it with a 
pension. Such a life never touches the finer gifts, 
it never requires their cooperation ; with this re¬ 
sult, that the man is left too often by sheer care¬ 
lessness without using any of these gifts at all. 
And so the gifts dwindle and collapse; they grow 
stale and beggared ; they lose nerve and pith; they 
“ stand all the day idle.” Such a man goes through 
his life to the very end without one high passion 
having ever been worked. The best part of himself 
has never been brought into action. “No man has 
hired it.” ISTo spiritual ideal has claimed it. No 
venture has been made with it. No voice has 
summoned it to rise and follow. It has felt no 
splendid necessity laid upon it to spend itself and 
be spent. Earth has not inspired it, Heaven has 
never found it. There it lies in the man—unex¬ 
amined, unexercised, unverified—until the man 
himself has forgotten its existence. For it, there¬ 
fore, life has been given in vain. It was there to 
prove its power, to test its validity, to disclose 
what patience, what tenacity, what pluck it pos¬ 
sessed. And it has never done it, for it has never 
got to work. It has been brought under no test. 

Spiritual idleness comes because no one hires. Is 
not that the peculiar disease of a day like our own, 
in which we are suffering from the recoil of many 
disappointments ? Science has disappointed us ; lib- 


IDLENESS. 


147 


erty has disappointed ns; industrialism has disap¬ 
pointed us; education has disappointed us; social 
reform has disappointed us ; philosophy has bitterly 
disappointed us. 

And if other causes and ideals fail to justify their 
appeal to men’s souls, what are we ‘to say of the 
highest cause of all, of the purest ideal ? What of 
the cause of God’s own vineyard of the Church , of 
the love of Jesus Christ f Ah ! can it be that here 
too these weary men in the market-place can retort, 
“ It has not hired us ” ? “ There is no clear call 

come from God to our ears. We have listened for 
it keenly enough at times. We have thought how 
glad would be the sound, how grateful the work, if 
only here in the service of the Christ, the good 
Master, we were set our task. We would commit 
ourselves to bear even the burden and the heat of 
the day, if it were only God who hired us. But 
here, too, we recoil with disappointment. We hear 
no definite summons which assures us of its authen¬ 
tic validity. We hear cries for help loud enough; 
but they are very human, and very mixed, and 
very doubtful in authority, and they contradict one 
another, and they dispute, and they are angry. 
And they all claim to be God’s own voice. Which 
are we to believe ? Which is the master to whom 
we shall hire ourselves in this confused Babel of 
claimants ? And then the Church itself, if we fall 
back on that! It is distracted by opposing move¬ 
ments. Its government is in a tangle. Its author¬ 
ity is shaken.” 

Ah, my brethren, that is easy enough to say from 


148 


IDLENESS. 


outside—looking on. I think it quite impossible to 
say it from within—in active service. Outside, the 
semblance that the Church of God is apt to wear is 
piteous enough. I grant it. Always it seems to 
be toppling over under some fresh blow. Always 
it is being disfigured and brought into contempt by 
the antics and the anger of its members. And there 
are contradictions, and quarrels, and uncertainties, 
and doubt, and lapses, and failures which encom¬ 
pass its work and rob it of its promise, and render 
its hopes sterile. Looking on, I can well fancy dis¬ 
may at the sorry sight. But within, for those com¬ 
mitted, for those hired to the task, there is an ex¬ 
perience wonderful, unfailing, miraculous, which is 
forever reversing the natural judgment. For them 
God is forever verifying His supremacy over all that 
man can do to defeat Him. Beneath the apparent 
chaos they become aware of a secret law and order 
which hold on their own way undaunted as the 
Spirit of the Most High verifies to them His pres¬ 
ence and His purpose. Within the storm, though 
the Master seem to be asleep, yet the whisper is 
ever reaching them from His blessed lips, “ Why 
are ye afraid, O ye of little faith!” Within the 
trouble there is always renewed the unfailing suc¬ 
cor, the unexhausted consolation. In the heart of 
the night there is light found about their feet. 
When they feel most weak, they find themselves 
strong; the strength of God is made perfect in and 
through their weakness. When the worst hour 
falls upon them they hear still that unconquerable 
voice that says, from One who is still in their 


IDLENESS. 


149 


midst, “ Peace I leave with you, My peace I give 
unto you ; your joy no man taketh from you.” 
That Church which seems ever breaking under hos¬ 
tile attack, sinking under the weight of its own sin, 
still forever survives, forever recovers, and still 
lifts itself from its sloth; still purges itself of its 
sin; still finds its work given it to do; still, though 
ever-dying, is ever being made alive. Under it is 
the unshaken rock, above it the everlasting heaven, 
and within it the beseechings and intercessions of 
the unflagging spirit of all comfort,-and strength, 
and peace, and joy, and love. And souls are still 
fed with these unfailing gifts of God; and thirst is 
quenched in the chalice of compassion ; and every¬ 
where in quiet places the redeemed are to be found 
moving by still waters in green pastures at the feet 
of the Good Shepherd of the sheep, the Bishop and 
Pastor of their souls. The ancient powers are yet 
at work in their old habitual energy. The peace 
that passeth all understanding yet broods within 
the holy shrine. This is the amazing victory of 
God, achieved amid much dismal disarray. And the 
very dismalness of the disarray heightens the glow 
of the victory. 


XXYI. 


Fifth Week—Thursday—the Twenty-sixth Day 
of Lent. 

Truthfulness . 1 

“Let your communication be Yea, yea: Nay, nay; for whatsoever 
is more than these cometh of evil.”—S t. Matthew v. 37. 

Brethren, I believe there is real necessity that 
the Christian pulpit in these days of ours should 
bear its witness as regards this most elementary 
duty of speaking the truth under all circumstances 
and on all occasions. I know that there are certain 
extreme and extraordinary occasions which people 
produce as necessary exceptions in order to puzzle 
one, in order in part to blur the severity of the 
practical rule. I suppose there are occasions when 
the question what we ought to do is a very perplex¬ 
ing one indeed. For all practical purposes the duty 
of truthfulness is not only peremptory, but it is uni¬ 
versal, and we do well to remember that our Lord 
warns us that to follow Him is to be exposed to 
trouble and to persecution. It was a religion of 
martyrs which He came to found. We are not re¬ 
quired to give our life for the name of Christ; but, 
depend upon it, we must not be surprised if from 
time to time we are required to suffer. If a man 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Charles Gore, Canon of Westminster, 
England. 


150 


TRUTHFULNESS. 


151 


* 

will not for gain’s sake say what is not true, he will 
in certain circumstances of life have to suffer. 

What is it we hear continually about our trade, 
about the untruthfulness of advertisements, about 
the untruthfulness of business agents, about the un¬ 
truthfulness which penetrates so often the concerns 
of retail dealing ? There are many honest trades¬ 
men, many surpassingly-honest men of business. 
Let us thank God for it; but we are too apt to 
shrug our shoulders when we hear of the dishonesty 
of the commercial world, and smile as if we were 
half-inclined to accept the maxim that truth and 
honesty do not ride in the same carriage. Our com¬ 
mercial life cannot be purged unless there are more 
people who are prepared as the last resort to suffer 
for their religion, for speaking the truth. 

Let us go down to things which touch our private 
life. How many people there are who, when they 
have committed a fault, seem to think nothing more 
natural than to deny it till they are actually detected 
and denial is of no use. In ordinary conversation, 
for the sake of giving point to a story, to exagger¬ 
ate our own importance, even at the expense of 
our neighbor’s character, what a vast number of 
people there are who, without conscientious scruples 
at all, embroider to make their story more attract¬ 
ive in the telling and hearing. And there are peo¬ 
ple, not, I fear, very few, who have got to reckon 
this ordinary sort of wandering beyond the truth 
so innocuous and so obvious that they have almost 
lost the faculty of remembering exactly what did 
happen and reporting it with truth. 


152 


TRUTHFULNESS. 


There are times when it behooves all of us to 
speak the truth, though it be the disagreeable truth, 
to our friends. They ask us to recommend them 
for some situation for which they are not fit; and 
how many people there are who are prepared to 
avoid the pain of saying what is disagreeable to 
their friends straight—they would say it readily 
enough behind their backs—by saying almost any¬ 
thing that will relieve them of the burden their duty 
would lay upon them. 

Then again in a period of theological controversy, 
Christians surely should know that truth is moral as 
well as theological. It is a terrible thing in contro¬ 
versy to show any degree of recklessness as to 
whether the particular imputation made is strictly 
and not more than truth in the particular case in 
which it is made. It is an awful thing, in contempt 
of the strict truth, to pour a vague atmosphere of 
suspicion and infamy over whole classes of people. 

Why should we be truthful? We get to the 
question of motive. St. Paul gives the motive. It is 
because “Ye are members one of another.” He 
really gives another motive, in a sense, the deeper 
one:—because we are forever living and acting and 
speaking in the presence and the power of God. 

God is every where; God is in all things. Truly 
worship is nothing less than this—it is the seeing 
God in all things, and all things in God. All ele¬ 
ments of beauty, all elements of power, all truths, 
all worthy characters in men about you, are but so 
many thin veils through which the eternal love and 
beauty and power and goodness of God are speak- 


TRUTHFULNESS. 


153 


ing to your souls. The whole earth is full of His 
glory. Heaven is His throne—ah! an intensified 
presence there—earth is His footstool and Jerusalem, 
for all the strangeness of its inhabitants, is the city 
of the Great King. 

That is the commonplace of religion, but it is a 
commonplace we so seldom think of ; and it carries 
with it another great thought—that God, Who now 
conceals Himself under the veil of nature , will one 
day manifest Himself and us with Him. How I 
may conceal myself from my fellow-men; I may 
speak one thing outwardly, and may live a life 
which is a lie; I may speak one thing outwardly 
and mean one thing inwardly; I may give a record 
of fact than which nothing is farther from the 
truth; but there comes the day of disclosure, the 
day when God shall bring every secret thing unto 
judgment, whether it be good or evil, the day when 
that which is hidden shall be disclosed, and/when 
we shall know one another exactly as we are, as we 
have done, as we have spoken, as we have thought, 
without veil or hindrance or concealment. The 
background of all religious life is this practice of 
the presence of God, this consciousness that God is 
nearer to us than the air we breathe, this conscious¬ 
ness that the word we speak we speak in the ear 
of Jehovah, that the life we live is lived in His 
presence. That is the ground of truthfulness. 
Therefore live, therefore speak as in His presence. 
Therefore speak the truth which in the most ordi¬ 
nary conversation, and not in oaths merely, is the 
sacred truth, “ Let your yea be yea, and your nay 


154 


TRUTHFULNESS. 


be nay, for whatsoever is more than this cometh of 
the Evil One.” 

Let us examine ourselves, therefore, about this 
very practical matter. The point is whether we 
have got an ideal of lofty and unalterable truthful¬ 
ness, and whether we resolve that, by the help of 
God, and in the consciousness of His presence, we 
are going to be in all our words and in all our rela¬ 
tions truthful, trustworthy men and women. There¬ 
fore, not only let me feel that I should not dare to 
say what was not true on my oath, not only let me 
feel that I would have honesty in my business deal¬ 
ings, not only let me feel that I will not speak ma¬ 
liciously to the defamation of my neighbor’s char¬ 
acter, not only that I will not blacken others, but 
resolve that in my ordinary promises and engage¬ 
ments, I will be trustworthy. Kesolve that you 
will be the sort of man whom if you say you will 
do a thing people will expect to find you doing it, 
and if you say you will not do a thing, people will 
not expect to find you doing it. Be trustworthy, 
be truthful in your ordinary conversation. For the 
whole of life we are to live in the light as in God’s 
presence, that is the only basis of a noble life ; we 
are to live in fellowship, man with man, because al¬ 
together we live in the one unchangeable fellowship 
of the light and life of God. 


XXVII. 


Fifth Week—Friday—the Twenty-seventh Day 
of Lent. 

Being and Doing . 1 

“ Thou art good and doest good.”—Ps. cxix. 68. 

There are some sayings in the Bible which are 
windows through which we can look into heaven. 
Not until we die can we enter Paradise and look 
out. But now we can stand outside and look in. 

Thus our text is like a pane of glass, through 
which we see the difference between God and man. 
With God, u tobe” is “to do.” Because He is 
good He does good. It is so with His angels. It 
is so with His saints in Paradise. Being is Doing. 
That is the law of heaven. But it is not always the 
law of earth. There are some good people, I am 
sorry to say, who do almost nothing for the help of 
mankind. They are pure, they are honest, they often 
pray, they are Communicants, they tell the truth 
and they do no harm. And yet, if they should die 
to-day, hardly any one would miss them. The 
world would lose very little. 

In fact, some very wicked men, although they do 
a great deal of evil, also do more good than a whole 

1 Sermon preached by Rev. Cornelius B. Smith, D. D., Rector 
Emeritus of St. James Church, New York. 


156 


156 


BEING AND DOING. 


churchful of sleepy Christians. This does not ex¬ 
cuse their badness. Don’t apologize for a man’s 
betraying his trust by saying that he is kind to the 
poor. Nothing can palliate dishonor. But it ought 
to shame all lazy believers to remember that some 
men who are stained with their sins, now and then 
step aside, and secure the passage of some law, or 
create a park, which will bless generations yet un¬ 
born, while thousands of dormant religious people 
fail to do anything of equal value to make life 
happier for mankind. 

It is so much easier to go to church and think 
of heaven, than to go to the unfortunate and carry 
heaven to them. Nevertheless, dear friends, this is 
just what the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ 
must do, during the new age which is dawning, or 
else I fear there will be a great decline in reli¬ 
gion. For Christianity has now reached the point 
where it must go forward, on the lines that have 
been opened by Toynbee Halls, Social Clubs 
for men and boys and girls, Brotherhoods of St. 
Andrew, Parish Houses, and beautiful churches in 
the poorest neighborhoods; every Communicant 
giving to these objects not money only, but active 
personal service and fraternity ; or else the world 
is going to say that modern Christianity is too un¬ 
like the religion of its Founder, to deserve a 
thoughtful man’s attention. 

There was never another age that respected work 
as this age respects it. There was never another 
age that reverenced the actual “ Imitation of 
Jesus,” as this age reverences it. But the Twen- 


BEING AND DOING. 


157 


tieth Century is going to say to the Churches, “ Do 
a Christlike work, or I will have no part with 
you! ” 

My friends, not long ago religion was able to 
preserve its organization and its numbers by the 
holding of sacred services twice on Sunday, and once 
in the middle of each week. The people said their 
prayers and heard the preacher, and thought 
chiefly of the other world, and prepared themselves 
to die. Very little was said in the pulpit about 
preparing to live. Almost no allusion was made to 
that work amid the multitudes which Jesus was 
always doing from morning till night. The fear of 
God was then a more alarming motive than it will 
ever be again. And it had this value, that it 
brought nearly everybody to church. 

Nevertheless, we should be very thankful for the 
change. Christ founded His kingdom upon love , 
not on fear . It is an infinitely better, safer, and 
stronger foundation. But I tell you, men and 
brethren, now that we are building upon love it 
must be a real love. That is what people saw in 
the first centuries. “ By this,” said Christ, “ shall 
all men know that ye are My disciples, that ye have 
love one to another.” 

This earth never saw another such “ Love- 
Society” as the early Church. It was born in 
an age fearfully selfish and corrupt. But just 
when evil and cruelty were at their height, there 
* suddenly appeared in all the leading cities of 
the world, a new and peculiar people who were 
ready to live and die for their neighbors. They 


158 


BEING AND DOING. 


were kind to those who “ despitefully used them 
and persecuted them.” They brought the glad 
tidings that God Himself had come out of His blue 
skies, and lived in our houses, walked in our streets, 
died our own death, and laid in one of our own 
graves, and risen triumphant from the dust. They 
said that He had redeemed mankind, and taught 
that God is Love, and that we are all His children, 
and brothers and sisters of each other. 

It was a wholly new truth. It attracted and it 
electrified the best element in the old Greek and 
Roman civilization. 

That, my friends, is the secret of the sudden and 
mighty conquest of the Ancient World by Chris¬ 
tianity. Unselfish love was flung like fire over the 
whole Roman Empire, and the frozen religion of 
the old gods couldn’t stand before it; but Jupiter, 
Diana, Yenus, Mercury, and Minerva went down 
like dust before God in Christ, who loved the 
world, and gave Himself for it. 

Ah, yes ! You may argue for Christianity for a 
thousand years, and make no impression on the un¬ 
believers ; but be Christianity, and all mankind falls 
into your arms. Don’t argue! Live ! Argument 
is a beggar by the side of Love. 

But men don’t want a sham love. They will not 
accept a lazy love. The day for that has passed. 
How the time has come for every Christian to be 
an active lover of his fellow-men. Young men and 
young women, you who are full of the morning 
and belong to the new age, don’t think of living 
without some definite work for the outside multi- 


BEING AND DOING. 


159 


tucles. Religion begins at home, but if it is good 
for anything great it takes the whole world in. 
You may have a class, you may join a guild, you 
may give time to reforms :—it is not for me or for 
any preacher to say what form your usefulness is 
to take. But if you have the spirit of Christ, you 
will find some people who are poorer than you are, 
or who know less than you know, and in showing 
them brotherhood, and giving them light, you will 
find a joy that the world knows not of. Oh ! It is 
splendid to discover noble souls in dim places; to 
reveal to them their own possibilities, and to flash 
through them the brightness and the love of 
heaven. 

Alas! The great world doesn’t go to church ! 
Why? 

One of the chief reasons is that it hasn’t seen 
enough Christians with Christ's Christianity. Them 
it will receive. Them it will love. With them it 
will attend sacred worship. 

The crying need of churches is to make an end 
of small religion, and to bring in a great religion. 
Let them blaze with the fires of love Divine, and 
then, from sea to sea we shall have a converted 
world, rejoicing in a light beyond the splendor of 
the morning. 


XXVIII. 


Fifth Week—Saturday—The Twenty-eighth 
Day of Lent. 

Having Some Part with Our Lord in Suffering . 1 

“ The fellowship of His sufferings.”— Phil. iii. io. 

St. Paul desired to secure the strange and awful 
privilege of fellowship with Christ in suffering. 
And if this singular aspiration were legitimate in 
an apostle, it can scarcely be otherwise in us; and 
hence I will ask your attention while I endeavor to 
set out the thoughts and realities of this desire. In 
doing so, our simplest plan will be to settle what 
this wish cannot have meant. 

1. St. Paul did not desire to die like Christ. A 
man might be crucified, and yet have no fellowship 
with the sufferings of the Crucified One. Likeness 
in suffering is one thing; fellowship in suffering 
another. 

2. St. Paul did not crave a share in the unique 
experience of the Redeemer, as the grand instance of 
the mysterious law of atonement by sacrifice. He 

did not mean that the sufferings God was pleased 
to assign him should in the remotest way have either 
communion or connection with the atoning work of 
the Redeemer. That work he knew, and we know, 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. William Lefroy, A. M., Liverpool, 
England. 


160 


PART WITH OUR LORD IN SUFFERING. 161 


stands alone. Nor may we doubt that of all the 
fearful elements in the last agonies of Jesus, His 
utter bereavement of sympathy, His oppressive lone¬ 
liness, was not the least. Oh, believe me, St. Paul 
could never have thought of sharing in these vicari¬ 
ous agonies! They do not admit of fellowship. 

We shall be able to understand St. Paul’s wish if 
we remember first of all that the sufferings of Christ 
arose out of His deep love for men. The love of 
Christ for the souls of men is measured by His love 
for the Father, who says “ All souls are mine.” 
Hence these wearying controversies with the men 
of His generation were to Jesus occasions when His 
holy soul was torn with pain, through the combined 
influences of affection for sinners and abhorrence of 
their sin. Jesus loved the Pharisee, whose sinister 
design was to entangle Him in His talk; He loved 
the Sadducee, whose coarse materialism or subtle 
unbelief, ignored the necessity of His sacrifice, al¬ 
though spellbound by the chastened splendor of His 
character; He loved the priests who debauched 
their office by bartering for His capture; He loved 
the people whose voices one day rang out the royal 
words, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” and the 
next, “ Away with Him, crucify Him ”; He loved 
the men of war who set Him at nought, the drunk¬ 
ards whose rhyming ribaldry was foretold by the 
Holy Spirit; yes, He loved the disciples who de¬ 
serted Him, the Peter who denied Him; and in my 
soul I feel He had a tear for the blackest heart that 
ever beat in human breast. Thus the great heart 
of Christ was broken by the pressure of His passion- 


162 PART WITH OUR LORD IN SUFFERING. 

ate love for men; thus was it saddened to the very 
death because of their sin. He died because He 
loved the one who loathed the other, and in thus 
loving and loathing we have a clearer and a truer 
view of that travail of the soul of Christ which shall 
yet be satisfied. 

And now we see what the apostle desired. He 
desired that new nature which would enable him to 
suffer as Jesus suffered at the sight of sin. He 
craved that transfiguration of character which would 
make holiness a horror, iniquity a plague, and trans¬ 
gression a pang. He entertained the heavenly am¬ 
bition of being made a “ partaker of the divine na¬ 
ture,” even though it made him susceptible of a 
thousand agonies. Yes, this was St. Paul’s prayer, 
when he said he renounced the friendships of youth, 
the associations of manhood, the smiles of those he 
loved, and the manifold advantages of his position, 
in order that he might know Christ, and the “ fel¬ 
lowship of His suffering.” 

This, his purpose I submit as an incentive to 
some, a consolation to others, and to all a test of 
our state before God. From its consideration the 
question knocks at the door of many a heart, u How 
am I affected by contact with sin f ” Men still make 
light of sin. It is trifled with in much of the litera¬ 
ture which teems from the press. It is the pivot 
on which fascinating figures move, sometimes in 
the pages of a novel, or the strains of a well-known 
song; sometimes in the thrilling death-scene of an 
opera; aye, even our hospitalities are sometimes 
degraded by hovering on the narrow margin which 


PART WITH OUR LORD IN SUFFERING. 163 

separates simplicity from excess, temperance from 
extravagance, self-restraint from self-indulgence. 

Then again, is it not true, painfully true, that 
men have a hundred merry names for sins which 
make God frown and good men weep ? Men for 
whom the Saviour shed His precious blood—men 
made in the image of God, rational, responsible, 
immortal, yea, laden with the obligations of holy 
baptism—smile on scenes which made the Son of 
God shed bitter tears, and which nailed Him to the 
tree ? If there is here a soul who smiles where 
Christ would sigh, and jests at that which made 
His life one long passion, filled His heart with 
overwhelming agony, and His soul with sorrow 
and fear; if amongst us now there is even one who 
has made merry over the deplorable excesses of the 
prodigal, the melancholy wreck of the sinful, the 
degrading exhibition of the inebriate; or, in a higher 
level, if you have trifled with the sanctities of reli¬ 
gion, belief, or Scripture, and practically despised 
and rejected the salvation which is yours by repent¬ 
ance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus 
Christ, then you have no fellowship with the suffer¬ 
ings of the Saviour. You have not the Spirit of 
Christ; and “ if any man have not the Spirit of 
Christ, he is none of His.” Thus you are supplied 
with reliable evidence of your state before God. 

To others the passage speaks in a finer and 
sweeter tone. It assures the believer that much of 
his sorrow is the counterpart of real joy. He may, 
on his way homeward this very day, hear ex¬ 
pressions which make his flesh creep, and his heart 


164 PART WITH OUR LORD IN SUFFERING. 

sink within him; he may hear mere children take 
God’s holy name in vain; see them profane life, 
language, the house of God, and the Sabbath day. 
Or there may be here one whose lot in life is cast 
in a home where God is forgotten, His word is un¬ 
studied, His church is forsaken, the sacrament is 
deserted, and Christ again despised and rejected of 
men. The Sunday-school teacher may grieve over 
the sin of some young or elder scholar; the district 
visitor may return from long toil, weary with sor¬ 
row for the sins of those whose souls she dearly 
loves; but “ be of good cheer,” better far to weep 
with Christ for the sins and souls of those you love, 
than to laugh with the heartless, the loveless, and 
the lost. Better far to have a fellowship with the 
suffering of your Saviour, with all the spiritual grief 
it is sure to bring, than to demonstrate your deg¬ 
radation in the scale of being; to proclaim your 
callousness, selfishness, and coarseness. Better far 
to be a “partaker of the divine nature,” even 
though you grieve over the havoc of religion, rea¬ 
son, and virtue, than to “ walk in the counsel of 
the ungodly,” to “ stand in the way of sinners ” or 
to “ sit in the seat of the scornful.” 

And so, be it your joy that there is a sense in 
which you can participate in the woes of your 
Master; be it a cause of gratitude that, alone as 
He was in the work of salvation, He permits you to 
be like Him, a man of sorrows! And if your love 
grow cold, your devotion be threatened by disturb¬ 
ance or distraction—if your self-denial be in any¬ 
wise imperilled, or your work for Him be dimin- 


PART WITH OUR LORD IN SUFFERING. 165 


ished by disappointment, recall the aspiration of 
His greatest preacher, and pray, as the deepest and 
most needful desire of your heart, “ Oh, my God, 
whatever Thou seest fit to take from me, give me, 
oh, give me, a fellowship with my Saviour in suffer¬ 
ing ! ” 


CHAPTEK XXIX. 


Sixth Week—Monday—the Twenty-ninth Day 
of Lent. 

God’s Best Comes Last . 1 

" When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made 
wine and knew not whence it was; (but the servants which drew the 
water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom and 
saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; 
and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou 
hast kept the good wine until now.” —St. John ii. 9, 10. 

Here in the text is a passing remark made in the 
unreflecting merriment of a marriage feast by a 
man who knew nothing of the ground on which he 
was treading, of the act which was proceeding, of 
the Person to whom his words referred. He had 
merely been startled into an outburst of compli¬ 
ment to the bridegroom who was himself ignorant 
of the cause, so he spoke with a light heart; and 
yet the gay words, as they fell from his lips, took 
a deeper tone and were touched to a finer issue—a 
truth leaps to light in them which is beyond his 
ken. The man himself perhaps, through the sheer 
simplicity of his gladness, has gone through to the 
very heart of the matter; that which has struck 
his imagination from without by its momentary 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Henry Scott Holland, M. A., Canon 
of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England. 

166 


god’s best comes last. 


167 


surprise, has kindled in him a felicitous capacity to 
hit upon the vital contrast which holds good every¬ 
where between man’s ways and God’s; but a secret 
has dropped under the excitement of an accident / a 
secret which goes to the root of the Incarnation, a 
secret which that old Apostle verified again and 
again for himself through all the long years that 
intervened since he was invited with Jesus and His 
mother to the wedding at Cana. 

Man brings out the best first; God holds His best 
in reserve to the last. How deeply, how profoundly 
true, how far that goes—so he declares. Little 
children, he would say, lay hold of it! It was but 
a passing phrase, tossed out of the laughter of a 
feast by a heedless speaker, who may have for¬ 
gotten it as soon as it was uttered, but let it be 
graven into the rock ! Wherever this Gospel of 
the Lord be preached in the whole world, there let 
it be remembered how on that famous day the 
ruler of the feast called the bridegroom unto him 
and said, “ Every man at the beginning doth set 
forth good wine, and afterward that which is 
worse, but thou hast kept the good wine until 
now.” Every man ! It is man’s normal habit; it 
is what he always does; his native instinct left to 
itself is sure to prompt him that way. Not in one 
thing only , but in everything a man brings out his 
best first. At the beginning he sets himself to show 
his good side; he is eager to please, to be friends, 
to be on good terms with everybody. He has the 
right intentions and he is glad to make them mani¬ 
fest. He and his fellow-men ought to have a pleas- 


168 


god’s best comes last. 


ant time together; life should be cheerful, and 
everybody should lend help to foster this good fel¬ 
lowship. There is the natural way we all begin, 
and almost everybody can hold out some fair prom¬ 
ise, and at the beginning at least make an attempt 
to set forth good wine. The difficulty is to keep it 
up. We have gone off with such a burst of hearty 
good-will that we have forgotten how we are to go 
on; we have not quite realized the strain that will 
be put upon our resources; we have been occupied 
with the anxiety to make a good impression, we 
have been in haste to secure the good of the mo¬ 
ment. 

“Afterward that which is worse.” Could any 
words more fitly express the wailing cry that goes 
up from man that is born to perish ? All over the 
earth, in all ages, that has been the bitterness of 
human experience. It has started, but it has not 
arrived; it has promised, but it has not fulfilled; it 
has begun, but not sustained; hopes languish, efforts 
flag, aspirations droop, the heroic sinks to common¬ 
place, the spiritual thrill fades into dull routine; 
the colors die out of the sunrise, the flatness of the 
afternoon turns all to drab; the chief whom we 
have followed slackens and leads no more; the 
saint repeats his old watchwords without the old 
fire! Yet it was good wine at the first; it was no 
fiction, no deceit, no blunder ! 

Nothing can be sadder, nothing can more plainly 
signalize the sorrow of man’s heart, the brand of his 
failure, than this dismal retribution which is ever 
awaiting his finest effort—“ afterward that which 


god’s best comes last. 


169 


is worse.” This is the cause of the grief which 
poets have always been singing, that is the wail 
that haunts the epitaphs which speak from the 
ancient tombs; and indeed, so real is this truth that 
it is to be found in the pages of the Sacred Book. 
Inspiration recognizes it as a theme which embodies 
the unsatisfied yearnings of humanity, which can¬ 
not find its goal, and so the preacher is allowed to 
pronounce his melancholy verdict. 

But we cannot but think that the words carry us 
deeper yet than human decay, for that decay is, 
after all, itself the signal of a darker evil that lurks 
beneath it, the poison of sin, and the refrain, there¬ 
fore, which conveys the melancholy of the decline 
has in it, too, the note that comes from wrong. 
For is there any characteristic more inherently 
typical of sin than this ? At the first sin sets forth 
what seems to be such good wine , and afterward that 
which is worse. That is the sin and the disillusion 
which it brings with it. Its promises are so reck¬ 
less, its offers so deceptive, that at the first we are 
overwhelmed with its generosity, so large-hearted 
it is, so free, so good-natured. How different this 
full world of sin, in its ease, in its spontaneity, 
from the pinched and scrupulous resources of piety 
and virtue. 

What would life be, what would it become, if it 
were to be a reiterated cry of thanksgiving which 
fell from our lips at each fresh stage of existence, 
at each incoming experience! That is what may 
be true. If God's grace be at the root of our growth , 
then youth may come and go, and still as it falls 


110 


god’s best comes last. 


away from us it will but serve to disclose more fully 
the latent secret of its own purest joy. The blos¬ 
som has been fair enough, but fairer still the flower, 
and after the flower has withered, lo ! there is the 
best that still remains, the fruit wherein God our 
Father is glorified. Yield yourself to Christ , and 
life will be an advance, not a decline; it will ever 
hold in it the germ of richer supplies. True, the 
flash of the early impulse will pass, but out of it, 
breaking it by the eternal force of Christ, springs 
a stronger forward motion with a steadier and a 
deeper rapture. True, the glamour of first fove 
will fade, but from within its heart abides the surer 
peace of a perfected passion. In Christ the dis¬ 
cipline of time does but serve to draw from the 
grape a fuller and finer vintage. As the trem¬ 
bling years drop from us, carrying away so much 
that we hold dear, so much that has seemed to us 
as the very joy of our being, a strange discovery of 
a larger, riper life in God that yet awaits us makes 
itself known. Again the wonder works, again the 
grace is felt, again out of our trouble, just as we 
fear to face our loss there will break from our heart 
the adoring thanksgiving:— 

“ I never knew before how much the love of God 
could restore for me. I never dreamed that life 
could be so strong, so glad, so free. How first I 
taste the fulness of God’s chalice. Oh, my God, 
Thou hast kept the good wine until now.” That 
may be the voice of all who will sit at the marriage 
feast with Jesus. How blessed if, far on in old age, 
when to outward eyes they seem bereft of every- 


god’s best comes last. 


171 


thing that can minister to joy and hope, while each 
year is lessening opportunities and imposing severer 
limits, they still can say in silence in the secret 
places of the soul, “ Nay, it is better than before. 
The good wine has been kept until now.” And 
still, when at last the evil days must come, and 
“ the years wherein it will be said, I have no pleas¬ 
ure in them, when the silver cord must be loosed, 
and the golden bowl be broken, when the mourners 
go about the streets and the man goes to his long 
home,” then as the soul passes out on its lone jour¬ 
ney it will find a great peace enfold it; it will feel 
the everlasting arms beneath it; it will know the 
depth of the riches of the love of God that passes 
knowledge; it will look up into the face of its own 
dear Master and King, who has been throughout 
the Lord of all its joy, and say, u This is the best; 
Thou hast kept, O Lord, the good wine until now— 
this wine which I drink now for the first time with 
Thee in the kingdom of heaven.” 




Sixth Week—Tuesday—the Thirtieth Day of 
Lent. 

Crucifying the Old Nature . 1 

“ If we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him.”— 2 Tim. 
ii. 12. 

It is the duty of all of us to crucify, not our 
nature, which is a noble and a splendid thing, but 
to crucify that which in our nature is base and bad. 
We must bring what is base and bad to the bar of 
conscience; we must determine to kill it. To use 
the metaphor and the phraseology of Scripture, we 
are to apprehend, we are to try, we are to condemn, 
and we are to nail to the cross the old man. 

When Christ was crucified there were first the 
nail in the feet, and then the nail in either hand, 
then the crown of thorns. What are the three 
nails, and what is the crown of thorns whereby the 
old man may in the companionship of Christ be 
placed upon the cross ? The first nail that we may 
use for the destruction of our own iniquity is the 
right acceptance of temptation. Life is a time of 
trial, of temptation. We know that our blessed 
Master bore the burden and took the trials of being a 
man. Then we are quite sure of one thing. When 
we are trying to bear and use temptation, we are 
quite sure of the answering mind of Christ. And 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. W. J. Knox Little, M. A., Canon of 
Worcester Cathedral, England. 

172 


CRUCIFYING THE OLD NATURE. 


173 


then pause for a moment and remember, it is no 
sort of use to ask, “ Why you should be tempted, 
why you should be tried ? ” Men must indeed, as 
it has been said, have very shallow minds if they 
think that in the depths of their ignorance they 
are to understand the Why of God this side of the 
grave. Suffice it for us that the first nail we can 
drive into our lust and passion is the right use of 
temptation. And then remember that we come 
fitted and equipped to meet the great eventuality. 
You have reason, you have conscience, you have 
thought, sufficient knowledge, will; above all, you 
have Divine grace. You come into the world 
fitted and equipped for the law of your being; you 
come into the world prepared, if you like, to use 
the powers that are given you, to meet temptation; 
that is, to drive the first nail into the body of the 
old man. Further, the question is this: How you 
use the unique power of responsibility of your will ? 
How to decide about the great difference between 
what you like and what you ought to do ? That 
is the important question. The duty is how to 
use our freedom—how, as we are made in the 
image of God, to use the freedom of choice that 
we certainly have, to make the higher nature 
govern the lower, how to make the lower wishes 
subservient to the nobler will. That is the 
question; and then we are reminded, are we not ? 
—it is the saying of one of the greatest teachers— 
that the whole interest of history is the moral 
interest, how men choose, how they prefer the 
right, the just, the true, the pure, to the dazzling 


174 CRUCIFYING THE OLD NATURE. 

temptation of immediate success, and therefore 
history comes and says that one of the greatest 
powers—do not start when I say it—placed at our 
disposal is the dealing with temptation; and to 
deal with it rightly, my brothers, is to drive the 
first nail into the bad part of our nature, into the 
old man; and therefore what I say about that nail 
is this:—Pray and strive that you may be delivered 
from the meshes and entanglements of pretence 
and self-seeking, that you may be kept from the 
unrealities and the secret hollownesses that don’t 
allow you to do what is right; pray that you may 
be delivered from the fascination of sin which 
blinds us. Blessed is the man that endureth temp¬ 
tation, for without temptation conquered, you would 
never be a man. “ Blessed is the man that endureth 
temptation; the Lord shall give him the crown of 
life; ” indeed, we are quite certain of that. Blessed is 
he that drives in that first nail against all unreality, 
against all pretence, all the insincerities that come 
to us always. From the treasons and the treach¬ 
eries of the human will, from the miserable pre¬ 
tences, from the respectable hypocrisies that keep 
us from doing right when we know what is right, 
from tampering with sin, from pretending to think 
that what is bad is good—good Lord, deliver us. 
You must be tempted. To bear temptation nobly 
and manfully is to drive the first nail into the cruci¬ 
fied body of the old man. 

And then the second nail is this — sorrow. Bight 
and left, up and down there is that tremendous, 
that most touching, that most moving fact; there 


CRUCIFYING THE OLD NATURE. 175 

is sorrow; and to deal with sorrow rightly, is to 
deal with the second nail in the death of the old 
man. You may be as prosperous as you like, my 
brother, at the moment, but, mind you, there is a 
universal and a strange law—there is the law of 
searching sorrow. Tears, tears. Ah! who shall 
tell the mystery of tears, to find that in your life 
there are sudden and crushing changes that go 
deep down beneath the immediate appearance of 
the moment, beneath the acts of every day, to re¬ 
member how constantly those changes come about, 
and how they may come. 

When you remember your own life, you are bound 
to remember the greatness and the certainty of sor¬ 
row, you are bound to remember that if life be the 
strongest fact, and if death be the one certainty, 
then our sweetest, our most glorious music must be 
set in a minor key. If sorrow comes to you, how 
do you bear it ? This is the second nail, if it is 
borne well, in the crucifixion of the old man. 

And then, there is the third nail. There is not 
only temptation, not only sorrow, there is the great 
deep mystery of pain. Now pain—I need not repeat 
it to you, it has been taught by a thousand teachers 
—pain is the deepest, but pain is the most universal 
experience of mortal life. Why it is sent I do not 
undertake to say any more than I undertake to say 
why God should govern His own world in the way 
that He does. But there it is. Our freedom, our 
mind, our conscience, our sensibilities, they are 
made so that they almost invite and certainly 
admit the visitor pain. 


176 CRUCIFYING THE OLD NATURE. 

There you have three nails—temptation, sorrow, 
pain; but what is really important is this: how do 
you deal with temptation? how do you make 
sorrow the way to higher things? how do you 
allow pain, as the great heroes of the world have 
allowed it, to become the very mistress and source 
of virtues ? If you use these things, my brothers, 
rightly, they are nails you drive into the feet and 
into the hands of your baser natures, they are 
your way of crucifying—to use the metaphor of 
St. Paul—the old man. 

There is, beside the nails, the crown of thorns. 
And how are you going to use the crown of thorns f 
There is a triumph to manhood if it lives and strives 
in the power of Christ. Will you remember what 
a great thing it is to be a man ? Will you learn to 
put your foot upon the brute within you? Will 
you learn how splendid is self-sacrifice, and how 
great it is not to live for yourselves, but for others. 
If we suffer with Him we shall reign with Him; 
and there is first the toil and then the slow struggle 
to victory which is never complete until we are able 
to say, “ It is finished ; into Thy hands I commend 
my spirit.” There is the toiling, there is the labor, 
there is the slow advance, but then at last you are 
king. If we suffer, we shall reign; at last you are 
king. This is the noblest of human endeavors ; 
this is the way in which we can help other people, 
because we begin by governing ourselves; this is 
the opening of the door to goodness and duty; this 
is the imitation of Jesus Christ. 


XXXI. 


Sixth Week—Wednesday—the Thirty-first Day 
of Lent. 

You Must Face Danger to Gain Benefit . 1 

“ So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the Gar¬ 
den of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, 
to keep the way of the tree of life.”— Gen. iii. 24. 

Man was banished from the Garden of Eden. 
The tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden 
was now safeguarded by the presence of the cher¬ 
ubim and by the flaming sword. We must not sup¬ 
pose, I think, that there was anything undesirable 
now in the tree of life as such. Sometimes we are 
inclined to read the story as though it meant that 
it was no longer desirable that man should take the 
tree of life. What I think the narrative really 
does mean is that it was no longer desirable that 
man should take that tree of life on the old condi¬ 
tions. The old conditions were conditions of ease. 
Man was free to everything that grew in the garden 
save the one forbidden fruit. The tree of life was 
before him. But now the conditions are entirely 
changed, and you will see that the change of con¬ 
ditions brings about not a change of principle, but 
a change in the application of a principle which was 

1 From a sermon by the Right Rev. Wm. Boyd Carpenter, D. D., 
Lord Bishop of Ripon. 


177 


178 FACE DANGER TO GAIN BENEFIT. 

destined to govern the whole of man’s life. That 
principle is that that which was desirable to be gained 
was no longer to be gained by methods of ease. If 
man is to take of the tree of life he can only take 
of the tree of life by facing the flaming sword which 
guards its place. If man is to eat of the produce of 
the ground he is no longer to eat it as it springs 
forth of itself, but thorns and thistles are springing 
out of the ground at the same time, and in the sweat 
of his brow he is to take the fair and necessary 
fruits of the earth. The fruits of the earth are no 
less desirable and necessary than before, but now 
they are to be taken under a new condition. The 
same is true of the tree of life; it is still as desirable 
as ever. Man still may dream of the joy and the 
glory of partaking of that tree of life; indeed he 
does so. The tree of life is as desirable for men as 
ever it was, but it can no longer be taken under the 
old conditions of ease. Now man must face danger 
in order to win it. Now it must be purchased at 
the cost of the risk of life. If man is to take the 
tree of life he must front the sword which turns 
every way to safeguard it from those who would 
approach. 

So the principle which we are seeking begins now 
to appear. The order of life in which men are to live 
henceforth is the order under which nothing that is 
worth winning can be won save at the expenditure 
of effort. It is precisely in harmony with the prin¬ 
ciple of which we have spoken with regard to the 
eating of man’s bread. Now, labor, effort, and sac¬ 
rifice are to be the conditions of winning the need- 


FACE DANGEK TO GAIN BENEFIT. 179 

ful supports of life. The highest of objects which 
man may desire, the achievement of his noblest 
dreams, the achievement of his highest successes, 
are now conditioned by this, that they must be won, 
and can be won, only by courageous and death-dar¬ 
ing hearts. 

If that is the principle I would ask you to notice 
how true that principle is, whether we consider life 
as a growth, a gradual development and improve¬ 
ment, or whether we consider life to be as it is—a 
great and widely-diffused influence over others. In 
these two ways we must always be able to regard 
life—your life and mine. It may be looked upon 
as an individual life developing from point to point 
and from moment to moment, and changing there¬ 
fore its aspect according to the opportunities of de¬ 
velopment which we give it; or we may regard life 
as being, as it is, a diffusive power, for no man’s life 
is an isolated thing. It exercises influence over 
those about him, and your life and mine may be 
measured, and must be measured, always both by 
what it is in itself as a growing thing and by what 
it is in its exercise of influence over others. But 
whichever way I look at life, whether I consider 
your life and mine as growing like things apart, or 
whether I regard life as being, as it is, an influence 
exercised over others, the same law is true. I can¬ 
not either win the tree of life for myself or win it 
to give to others save on the condition of facing that 
flaming sword. It is the law of existence that what¬ 
ever you look at as the tree of life, as therefore the 
desirable object, you must reach forward to it at 


180 FACE DANGER TO GAIN BENEFIT. 


the cost of the sword. Ask the man who has had 
experience of training men in life, “ Why is it that 
there are so many failures ? ” Take what occupa¬ 
tion you please, and then tell me what is the secret 
of the failure of so many. The answer is this: 
“ There are many who look across the little frontier 
into the Eden of their ambition, who have the ca¬ 
pacity for desiring the tree of life and think their 
life would be happy if only they could grasp that 
fruit, who yet have neither the energy, nor the in¬ 
dustry, nor the self-denial, nor the courage, nor the 
daring patience to pursue the path which it is neces¬ 
sary they should pursue in order to attain it. There 
are hundreds who want to grasp the fruit, but only 
a few who have the courage to pay the price which 
it is necessary should be paid.” In other words, all 
life brings to us the same thought that we are liv¬ 
ing in a condition in which, in the order of things, 
if we desire the thing which to us seems to be de¬ 
sirable, we must be prepared to pay the price. The 
sword stands between us and the tree of life. 

The growth of life means that as you pass from 
lower to higher you must lay something aside. You 
cannot win, in the order of existence in which you 
live, the higher which you desire save by the sacri¬ 
fice of what is lower. With the child it is so. “ Put 
away your toys,” you say to the child, “ the hour 
has come for higher things. Your intellect now 
demands that it should enter into the arena of life. 
You have had your little opportunity of experi¬ 
menting at your leisure amid these things, the toys 
of your childhood. Now you enter into a larger 


FACE DANGER TO GAIN BENEFIT. 181 

life. The toys must be put away.” The law of 
sacrifice enters into the nursery, and as you pass 
from the nursery to the schoolroom you have to put 
the knife once more to the things which were dear 
in order that the larger and the better things may 
be developed. 

Now if that is true just think for a moment that 
it must be true in the moral or the spiritual advance 
of man. Is it enough for you to say, “ My life is 
well esteemed, my condition respectable, my name 
honored ” ? Or is it for us to say, “ There is some¬ 
thing more that I desire than that. I am not con¬ 
tent that I should be as a man who only holds his 
place here in the mere conventional esteem of men ? 
There is a power by which I am judged, nay, there 
is a power by which I judge myself, which teaches 
me and tells me that I cannot and dare not stop 
here. I am created with a capacity for growth, and 
my growth means the aspiration after something 
better, and I must be God’s man in God’s world. I 
must be the thing which God would have me be; 
and I must not be satisfied because Society is satis¬ 
fied, and I must not be satisfied because my family 
is satisfied, but I must only and I can only be satis¬ 
fied when I have reached out my hand to grasp 
something yet higher still.” That higher is that 
you should be ready to move onward in spiritual and 
moral force, seeing that there is nothing which you 
would desire more than that you should become yet 
more righteous, filled with such a thirst after right¬ 
eousness that you cannot be satisfied with the world 
as it is, filled with such a capacity of love for oth- 


182 FACE DANGER TO GAIK BENEFIT. 


ers that you could not be satisfied with your own 
ease in the contemplation of their sorrow and their 
misery, filled with such an unrest which teaches you 
that there can be no peace for the soul of man until 
he has reached that real tree of life which means 
the fruits of good, the fruits of righteousness, the 
fruits of faith, the fruits of love, the fruits of conse¬ 
crated and dedicated life. If therefore the law of 
growth be worth anything , it means that you can only 
step up to this by sacrifice. This is exactly what 
Christ said. Here was a young man, amiable, ex¬ 
actly the picture of that state of Society which I 
wish to describe where there is no blame, no harm, 
no moral offence which can be alleged against him, 
but as to whom Christ declares that there is some¬ 
thing lacking. If he would be perfect he must put 
the sword to his own sense of ease and comfort. 
He must face the flame; he must sell all that he 
has. He must throw in his lot with that life which 
is still the crowning ideal life of mankind—the life 
of Christ filling him. If he would grasp with this 
the true Tree of Life it can only be by facing and 
fronting that sword. 

Turn the thought once more. Life is not merely 
developed. Life is not the pursuit of self. Life 
is an influence, and no man lives without diffus¬ 
ing that influence either for good or evil round 
about him. And no man can be satisfied by 
saying, “ I am a creature apart, and so long 
as I fashion my life as I please and as I think 
proper, none have a right to interfere with me.” 
Take life, then, as an influence, and I say that even 


FACE DANGER TO GAIN BENEFIT. 183 

then you must face the sword that you may grasp 
the tree of life. This is the hardest thing of all. 
If I shall choose to live a life of unselfishness; if I 
shall choose to live a life for the sake of others, can 
I not just take the tree of life and distribute it to 
my brother men without encountering this sword ? 
Surely, if then my desire is thus human and philan¬ 
thropic that I am ready to put aside all thought of 
myself, I shall then be able to gather this fruit for 
them without such a sacrifice as that. And the 
answer is no. Though you sit outside the Garden 
of Eden, and you behold these fair fruits and look¬ 
ing round upon the multitudes at your side you say, 
“ Would God I could take of these fair fruits and 
give to these in their need; would that I could take 
of the invigorating power and give new moral and 
spiritual energy to these; would that remembering 
their sorrow and their starvation I could take of 
that fruit and fill their souls with joy and gladness,’’ 
still even so you cannot gather them save you face 
that sword which turns every way to keep the tree 
of life. The benefactors of men have been always 
compelled to confront that sword. In the smallest 
things it is true. The man who makes a new dis¬ 
covery, the man who has invented something which 
will be a benefit to his fellow-men—how much has 
he to encounter the sword and the flame of criti¬ 
cism ? If there is to be a benefit conferred upon 
men the Lord of life Himself has told us that the 
only condition upon which it can be conferred is 
through the sword, through the pain, through the 
suffering. He stood, and when men were saying to 


184 FACE DANGER TO GAIN BENEFIT. 

Him, “ The crown and the world may be yours,” 
when these eager, ambitious souls that saw things 
only after a worldly fashion were ready to come 
and take Him and make Him a king by force, He 
stood amongst His disciples and said, “ The crown, 
that is, the power of conferring benefit upon men— 
the crown, that is the capacity of helping my brother 
man can only be won through the Cross.” The seed 
cannot grow except it die, and so He stood and pro¬ 
claimed that if any man would put upon his brow 
the crown which the philanthropist seeks to wear, 
the crown of love, the crown of sympathy, the crown 
of kindness, he can only do it at the cost of the 
sword. And so Christ wrought facing the Cross, 
and if He is crowned He is crowned with a crown 
of human gratitude, because He was first crowned 
with a crown of thorns. If you would take the 
place of following the Christ because you are ani¬ 
mated by the desire of making your influence felt 
for the highest good of the world you can only 
grasp the tree of life and distribute its benefits to 
your fellow-men if you are prepared to go and face 
the flaming sword. What was your baptism if 
it was not a death to something that you might be 
alive to something better ; the death of sin that you 
might reach to a life of righteousness; the death of 
the old nature, that the new nature might be mani¬ 
fested ? This is progress; this is advancement; 
this is a movement from the lower to the higher, 
that there shall be the sword planted in the heart 
of the old nature in order that the new nature may 
be raised up in us. And if you and I wish to live 


FACE DANGER TO GAIN BENEFIT. 


185 


lives full of real, personal influence upon the world, 
if we wish to follow our Master, be sure of this, that 
there is no chance of it for any soul of man who has 
not learned the experience of the death of the lower 
that the life of the higher might be liberated also. 


XXXII. 


Sixth Week—Thursday—the Thirty-second Day 
of Lent. 

Living in Christ . 1 

“Abide in Me and I in you.”— John xv. 4. 

“ Abide in Me! ” These words sum up all 
Christian life. “ And I in you.” These words sum 
up all the promises of the Lord to Christians. To 
“ abide ” in Christ, what does it mean ? 

It means, first of all, to cherish in the mind 
the constant recollection of the Lord Jesus Christ , 
of what He was, and what He said, and what He 
did, and to have Him constantly present, as it 
were, to our thoughts. The cherishing of the 
thought of Christ, the calling Him back to mind, 
the frequent reference to Him in the thought of 
other things, does not mean that we are to shut out 
altogether all thoughts of other things, but rather 
that the thought of Christ should be so present that 
all other thoughts coming into the mind should, as 
it were, derive an inspiration from the secret pres¬ 
ence of that one thought which makes all things 
heavenly. And as we cherish His presence so must 
we cherish constantly the thought that we are His, 
and that He is ours; that the thought of Him, the 

1 From a sermon by the Most Rev. Frederick Temple, D. D., Arch¬ 
bishop of Canterbury. 

18 P 


LIVING FOR CHRIST. 


187 


memory of Him—above all, so far as we can attain 
to it, the love of Him—should secretly move all 
that is within the soul. So, in the first place, shall 
we abide in Christ. 

But to abide in Christ means not merely to think 
of Him vaguely, but to study His teaching, to study 
it often and thoughtfully to endeavor to see how it 
applies to every circumstance in our service of Him; 
to study it as it is written in the Gospels, as it is 
expounded in the Epistle; to study it with care, to 
study it with quiet meditation, with constant ac¬ 
companying prayer for enlightenment; to study it 
with care as men study that which they value. To 
abide in Christ is to learn His teaching and to learn 
it in ever-increasing fulness as years go by, to learn 
it so that it shall be familiar to the mind, and per¬ 
haps also familiar to the tongue until the very in¬ 
tellect shall be transformed by the power of His 
heavenly word. 

And again, it is not only in studying His teach¬ 
ing that we abide in Him, but in meditation on His 
actions , on all His wonderful mercies from the 
highest to the lowest, on the love and the unselfish¬ 
ness, and on the surrender even of that which is 
highest in order that He might be a blessing to His 
own creatures; in meditation on everything that is 
recorded in which He showed His power, but, 
above all, on His marvelous kindness. By medita¬ 
tion on these things naturally we begin to feel the 
power and the beauty that is in them. By medita¬ 
tion on these things all His works of mercy become 
realities to our thoughts until we feel as if we al- 


188 


LIVING FOE CHKIST. 


most hear the words that He spoke and see the 
mercies that He bestowed. 

And yet once more, to abide in Christ is to live 
by His example. It seems as if nothing could be 
more impossible to bid us follow than to follow His 
example. He was God, and we are but weak and 
sinful men ; how can we follow the Divine example 
in our weak and petty life ? How can we follow 
the Divine example when there is so much within 
us that is false, and so much that is ungenerous ? 
How can we follow His example? He Himself 
has told us that even to give a cup of cold water is 
a thing that He will notice if it is a thing which is 
done in His spirit. And that spirit should animate 
all the actions of every day. Ho doubt it is here 
particularly that it seems as if our power to obey 
His precept must break down. To follow His ex¬ 
ample ! How can it be done ? The Lord Himself 
when He calls us to follow His example knows our 
weakness, and knows what is needed for the task 
He has put upon us. He enters into all the follies, 
and all the blindness, and all the passions, and all 
the temptations that mark our characters and 
lower our lives. Without sin Himself, He never¬ 
theless shared all the trouble of human life, and, as 
if to encourage us, these strange and beautiful 
words have been written by His direction, that He 
learned obedience by the things which He suffered. 
He learned obedience because He passed through 
all that was needed to make obedience perfect. He 
learned what to obey really meant. His humanity 
had to pass through what our humanity passes 


LIVING FOR CHRIST. 


189 


through. What was the struggle, what was the 
trouble that perpetually impeded obedience? He 
learned to feel it, and still He retains that humanity 
which felt it, and He sympathizes with every diffi¬ 
culty that besets our endeavors to please Him. He 
sympathizes because He knows all; He sympathizes 
because He has passed through it all. And if we 
are to abide in Him, we, too, must learn obedience. 

And so, too, following upon that necessarily 
comes the measuring of the right and wrong of 
every action by the one question—Will this please 
my Lord and Saviour? The conscience is to be 
awake not merely to the particular rule of doing 
right and not doing wrong, but that particular rule 
itself is to be identified with and absorbed, as it 
were, in the hope of pleasing Him, Him the incar¬ 
nate righteousness; whatever else may follow still 
to please Him. That is the aim of the man who 
abides in Christ. So literally to abide in Christ is 
to be full of frequent prayer to Him, and of fre¬ 
quent prayer to our heavenly Father that we may 
purify ourselves even as He is pure, that we may 
be more like unto Him. The great prize of the 
Christian’s warfare is to be made like the Lord. 
This is the Christian life. This, as it were, gathers 
into one all that is taught us and all that is com¬ 
manded us—to live in the memory of the love of 
Christ, to live in the hope of pleasing Him. 

Let us turn to the other side, for the Lord adds 
to His precept that promise beyond all promises, 
" I in you.” He abides in us. 

How does His presence within us manifest itself 


190 


LIVING FOR CHRIST. 


even to ourselves? First, in the growth of con¬ 
science, in the education of that spiritual faculty 
which God has planted in every human soul by 
which we are able to appreciate that which is 
beautiful in spiritual things; that spiritual faculty 
which raises man above the level of the animals all 
round him, that spiritual faculty which marks us as 
citizens of a spiritual country. It is planted in 
every man’s breast, but it needs the education and 
the growth which all other faculties need; and it 
is in the growth, in the power, in the clearness of 
the conscience that the presence of the Lord Jesus 
Christ will surely be seen. The man who abides in 
Christ while Christ abides in him will see the will 
of God more and more clearly as his service con¬ 
tinues ; he will see what the Lord is and what it is 
he is called to love when he is bidden to love the 
Lord ; he will learn the beauty of the spiritual 
life, for the Lord Jesus will write it on his heart. 

More and more shall he be able to appreciate 
God’s truth, and to apply it to the conduct of his 
own life, and as he will thus find the Lord’s pres¬ 
ence in the expansion and the clearness of his con¬ 
science, so, too, will he find it in the strengthening 
of his will. The Lord will abide in him, and he 
will find himself stronger and stronger to put down 
temptations as they arise, to brush aside thoughts 
that trouble him, but do not really tempt him. As 
time goes on he will learn to hold himself fast 
against much that once disturbed him, that once 
shook his very soul. His will will become stronger 
to serve the Lord, his purpose will become more 


LIVING FOR CHRIST. 


191 


fixed and resolute, and he will find that he gains 
by the Lord’s own grace, and that he perpetually 
increases in that self-control which is needed for all 
the higher life. 

And then what will be more to him yet, what 
will be to him a strong and perpetual happiness, is 
that he will find that by God’s grace the warmth 
of his love will kindle to more and more fervor , and 
more and more entirety of self-surrender. 

To love, and to know that you love God; what 
is it that makes a man really happy except it be 
that ? The Lord is sure to give it. By the work¬ 
ing of His Spirit He will draw the heart closer and 
closer; His love will awake our love, and the more 
we abide in Him and meditate on Him, and upon 
His marvelous self-sacrifice, the more shall we find 
kindling within our hearts that love which is, as it 
were, the seal of our Christian hope; that love 
which marks us for His own not only in His sight 
—for He sees even in our weak endeavors to obey 
Him the love that is already stirring within us— 
but it will be visible not only to Him, but to our¬ 
selves, trembling, and doubting, and hesitating 
whether we can claim that we really love the Lord 
with all our hearts. Yes, the Christian, by the 
abiding presence of Christ within him, moves slowly 
but surely on to that great consummation of all 
true Christian life. 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 


Sixth Week—Friday—the Thirty-third Day of 
Lent. 

The Life of Consecration . 1 

“ He saved others, Himself He cannot save.”— St. Matt, xxvii. 42. 

Many a sarcasm enshrines the truth it was in¬ 
tended to deride. And so against themselves and 
their own will men are forced to speak the truth. 
The oath of the blasphemer becomes thus a witness 
for the existence of God; and in a thousand ways, 
when men have twisted and warped their speech 
into falsehood and wrong, the self-same formula is 
rescued to the highest purpose. On a colossal scale 
all this is verified in the drama of our Saviour’s 
Passion. Caiaphas unwittingly, and of course un¬ 
willingly, bears witness to the priesthood of Christ: 
Pilate and Herod to His kingship ; and the angry, 
railing crowd in my text testify to two eternal 
truths which I will endeavor to expound in my 
brief meditations upon the life of consecration. 

“He saved others.” We know what they meant 
by this taunt shot from the foot of the Cross. 
“ Thou, O Nazarene, art an impostor. Either not 
at all, or, if at all, then by diabolic agency, Thou 
hast done Thy saving works. This is the test of 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. Dr. J. M. Danson, of Aberdeen, Scot¬ 
land. 

m 


THE LIFE OF CONSECRATION. 193 

Thy verity—save Thyself. What boots it that 
Thou hast raised the dead or hushed the storm if 
Thou canst not save Thyself ?” We sometimes 
wonder that no voice of protest was raised in that 
fell crowd against the terrible crime; that no 
woman, even, inspired by generous gratitude, cried 
aloud, “ Hold! the man whom ye slay brought sun¬ 
shine into my dwelling. Before He came to us my 
husband’s soul was dark with doubt, his life sunk 
in degradation; but He gave him salvation, moral 
health; fixed his faith on the eternals; made the 
breezes of the Beulah land blow around him, until 
the moral nature began to recover and grow strong. 
He is now a pilgrim of light. Let others praise 
Him for despoiling the tomb of its prey, or for giv¬ 
ing sight to the blind. My husband He has saved! ” 
That no such protest came is another painful hu¬ 
miliation of our nature. 

I need not tell you what is the real meaning of 
the confession, “He saved others,” extorted from 
this crowd of mockers. By His Incarnation He 
saves the race ; by His life He gives the saving ex¬ 
ample ; by His death the saving blood; by His 
Holy Spirit a saving Church. Glory be to His 
Name. “ He saved others.” 

But the truth is no less interesting and instruc¬ 
tive, that “ Himself He could not save.” There are 
three classes of men who have never found it possi¬ 
ble to save themselves, and these are the noble, the 
tender, and the brave. 

The noble can never save himself. He is the god¬ 
like among men, and the life of God is the life of 


194 THE LIFE OF CONSECRATION. 

gift. When God reigned in eternal solitude, He 
was all-sufficient in Himself to Himself, and yet 
He refused to continue without an object to love. 
This was the motive of Creation. The all-filling 
Subject craved for an object. Then began the 
work of turning nought into ought and chaos into 
cosmos. Angels were the first rational product of 
that all-forming Hand, and mark how they reflected 
the prime characteristic of their Maker. Their life, 
like His, is the life of giving and spending self for 
the benefit and saving of others, both in the things 
of time and eternity. The child in its slumbers; 
the sailor on the stormy deep; Lazarus in his pas¬ 
sage from poverty to Paradise—each in turn is the 
object of the love and care of these beauteous self- 
sacrificing spirits. In the Supreme God and in the 
holy angels men behold the ideal life, the true no¬ 
bility. Let us speak of men—noble men. A king 
never could ennoble any one; he only found a 
man noble and gave him a certificate accordingly. 
These were the men that “ saved others,” and gave 
themselves. These are the kinsmen of all noble, 
useful natures, whether in the hierarchy, or the 
priesthood, or in the ranks of the laity who live for 
God and their fellow-men. 

Neither can the tender one “ save himself” What 
is the glory of womanhood, especially of mother¬ 
hood—of the maternity of blessed Mary as well as 
of every mother that listens to me to-day—but this, 
that love sweeps the heart of self, and makes joy¬ 
ful the service done for the helpless child through 
dark days and hopeless nights, when self will not, 


THE LIFE OF CONSECRATION. 


195 


cannot save itself ? Or again what is it that makes 
her heart beat as she listens to the howling wind 
and raging sea which imperil the life of her sailor 
son, whose early waywardness has cost her many a 
pang ? Or, once more, what is it that makes “ the 
votaries of St. Clair ” in every age forsake their 
dear old home, and go forth, with their lives in 
their hands, to tend the wounded on the battle¬ 
field or the fever-stricken crowds of our overgrown 
cities ? You need not be told that it is the tender¬ 
ness of their hearts. They give, and by giving save 
not themselves but others. 

Neither can the brave man “ save himself” It is 
his high priesthood to save others by the sacrifice 
of himself. Ease, time, fortune, blood, life, all ex¬ 
cept honor, are offered ungrudgingly upon the 
altar of fatherland when duty calls. This is the 
glory of the hero from the days of Homer to our 
own. 

The “ blood which is the life ” is the brave man’s 
last supreme sacrifice to the grandeur of duty. And 
yet courage is of two kinds—physical and moral. 
There is a great brute boldness, which, like Sam¬ 
son’s, fears no foe, if the foe is in the shape of a 
tangible opponent, an opponent which sword or 
spear or rifle can lay low. Alas! that such a cour¬ 
age should at times be only physical and not moral. 
Sometimes the man who will march right up to the 
cannon’s mouth dare not advance a new opinion, 
dare not join a minority in politics or religion, dare 
not “ boldly rebuke viceand “ constantly speak 
the truth ”—is routed, in fact, by satire or sarcasm 


196 THE LIFE OF CONSECRATION. 

and public opinion. And yet moral courage is the 
highest in all the category of courage. 

And now let us apply to our blessed Lord these 
three bars to self-sawing — nobility , tenderness , and 
bravery , and at once it becomes obvious, in propor¬ 
tion to the unmeasurable degree in which He pos¬ 
sesses them, how true the words must be of Him, 
“ Himself He cannot save.” Noble ! “ Thou art 

fairer than the children of men, Son of God and 
Son of Mary.” Thy patent is not only “ of earth’s 
best blood,” but has “ titles manifold ” in heaven it¬ 
self. “ The dew of Thy birth is of the womb of 
the morning” of eternity. Thy nobility binds 
Thee to deeds of self-sacrifice. Thou comest into 
the world to give, not to save Thyself. Thou art 
the Father’s Logos, His commissioned expositor of 
truths forgotten or neglected. But above all, the 
one only ransom for the sins of men. Tender! 
Thy sympathy was softer, sweeter,, fuller than hu¬ 
man breast contains. In Thee the best qualities of 
man and woman unite. In Thee there is specific¬ 
ally neither male nor female, bond nor free. For 
in Thee is the synthesis of the greatness of man 
and the sweetness of woman. Brave! Thou King 
of moral heroes, daring even unto death, the Martyr 
of saving truths which the world in its cruel blind¬ 
ness cast away from itself, and then madly slew 
their Author. That Thou wast physically brave 
Thy wounded body, “ marred more than the sons 
of men,” bore witness. Likewise Thy unquailing 
eye before Pilate. But greater witness of Thy 
bravery we find in the moral courage which marked 


THE LIEE OF CONSECRATION. 


197 


Thy tranquil proclamation of startling truths:—“ I 
am the Light of the world.” “When I am lifted 
up I will draw all men unto Me.” 

But by a strange solution of the paradox, the 
grace and wisdom of God have so arranged it that 
in the end the saviour of others does in very truth 
save himself. In losing himself he saves himself, 
by “ working out his own salvation with fear and 
trembling.” All saviours of others become incor¬ 
porated in the one great central work of salvation 
whose theatre is Calvary. Not in vain does the 
Apostle call us “ fellow-workers with God ” ; not 
merely rhetorical is the exclamation of the Psalm¬ 
ist, “ I have said ye are gods; ye are all the chil¬ 
dren of the Most Highest”; or, to quote a Scottish 
poet, who has beautifully formulated the doctrine 

“ All through life we see a cross, 

Where sons of God yield up their breath; 

There is no gain except in loss, 

There is no life except in death.” 


XXXIY. 


Sixth Week—Saturday—the Thirty-fourth Day 
of Lent. 

Our Lord Weeping Over the Sins of Men . 1 

“ And when He was come near, He beheld the city, and wept over 
it.”—S t. Luke xix. 41. 

There are few things more pathetic or effective 
than tears. The tears of a child, or of a woman, al¬ 
ways arouse our sympathy. A man’s tears are less 
frequently seen, not because less sensitive or sympa¬ 
thetic, but his nature is physically stronger. When, 
however, we see a man in tears, we know that there 
is some intensely serious cause. It is not pain, it is 
not a loss, however great, that will ordinarily wring 
tears from man’s stronger nature. It must be some 
great sorrow. 

There are passages in Holy Scripture where we 
find strong men moved to tears. Thus we read of 
Esau’s tears, when he found that he had lost his 
blessing. We know how Jacob wept at the report 
of the death of his beloved son Joseph. Thus also 
David wept on the death of his dear friend, Jona¬ 
than, and once more St. Peter, we are told, wept 
remorseful tears because he had denied his Master. 

But here in the text there is one greater than all. 
We do not hear of His weeping for Himself in His 

1 From a sermon by Rev. J. R. Baldwin, formerly Chaplain in India. 

198 


OUR LORD WEEPING OVER SINS OF MEN. 199 

sorrows, not even for the pains of the cross, and the 
temporary loss of His Father’s favor, much as He 
felt it. But the sorrows that would come upon the 
beautiful city of Jerusalem, the miseries that would 
befall the people in the coming siege, the thought 
of their sins, and their indifference to the offers of 
salvation, the thought of these things, to the pro¬ 
phetic mind of Jesus, as He looked over the city, 
glittering in the sunshine amid the olives and vines, 
caused Him to weep. Why did our Lord weep over 
Jerusalem ? 

1. Because He knew , as no one else could know , 
the real condition of that city. 

Remember it had received blessings and privileges 
vouchsafed to no other city, and to no other nation. 

To it God sent special messengers, the prophets, 
to instruct and warn. To them the oracles of God, 
the sacred scriptures, were given. In their sight, 
daily, we might say hourly, was presented the most 
splendid representation of sublime worship this 
earth has ever seen, arranged by God Himself, type 
of the worship of the heavens, with its smoking sac¬ 
rifices, its pleading incense, its enthusiastic offerings 
of praise, and its gorgeous symbolism, all reminding 
them of the heavenly temple. 

But more, its hallowed courts had been trodden 
by the Son of God; its multitudes fed, not merely 
by the bread of earth, but by the bread of life, and 
words spoken, golden words, had fallen from His 
lips, such as never man spake—words which have 
made the Gospel the storehouse of wisdom and 
goodness for the world, and enshrined the name of 


200 OUR LORD WEEPING OVER SINS OF MEN. 

Jesus all along the ages, as the best teacher of man¬ 
kind. 

And yet, and yet, Christ, who knew what was in 
man, when He looked upon that city, saw little or 
no result of His toil. 

There was sin in high places. The sins of Greece 
and Rome had not failed to corrupt even the high 
priesthood itself, and the most respectable of the 
many sectaries of that day, are denounced as hypo¬ 
crites and formalists. As were the leaders, so were 
the people, sunk in sin and indifference, unable to 
see the beauty of the Son of Man, and unable to 
accept His teaching. 

As Christ considered this state of things, and 
knew that the people whom He loved would reject 
Him, and put Him to death, and that soon, very 
soon, Roman armies would besiege the beloved city, 
slay or make slaves of the inhabitants, the mind of 
Jesus, appalled by the cumulated agonies of that 
siege, and the destruction of the city, wept over it. 

2. Another reason why our Lord wept over the 
guilty city was that He knew the last warning had 
now been given. 

There is a limit to patience. God will not always 
strive with man. Recall some of the instances in 
Scripture which illustrate this fact. 

Noah uttered his warnings, but the men of his 
day heeded him not. At length there came a last 
warning and the flood he predicted overwhelmed 
them. 

Lot told his sons-in-law of the impending destruc¬ 
tion of the guilty cities of the plain, but he seemed 


OUR LORD "WEEPING OVER SINS OE MEN. 201 

to them as one who mocked. Well had it been if 
they sought escape from the woe that overcame 
Sodom and Gomorrah. 

And now once again there is a last warning. A 
greater than Noah is here. More sure than the in¬ 
spiration of angels is the knowledge of the Son of 
God. He warns the guilty city of its impending 
doom. They have a chance to repent and to escape, 
but they will not turn from their sinful ways. He 
sees the hardness of their hearts, and knows what 
is coming upon them. 

The Friend of sinners weeps because He knows 
that it is the last warning they will have before the 
visitation of punishment for their sins. 

3. Then again, Jesus wept because these citizens 
of Jerusalem, the doomed, knew not the day of their 
visitation. The day of visitation—this is no empty, 
unmeaning phrase. It is true of nations and indi¬ 
viduals. There is a day of visitation for all. The 
laws of God cannot be broken with impunity. 
There come warnings and then the inevitable result 
—punishment according to the sin. The history of 
the world is full of alarming lessons that nations 
and cities cannot sin against righteousness and es¬ 
cape. 

The Jews would not see the signs of the times, 
and their increasing sin and indifference culminated 
in the cruel murder of the Son of God. We are 
told these things were hid from their eyes, that is, 
they blinded their eyes, so that they could not see, 
and did not know what was befalling them till ruin 
fell upon them. 


202 OUR LORD WEEPING OVER SINS OF MEN. 

From this explanation of why our Lord wept over 
Jerusalem we may pass on to some of the lessons 
which are taught us. 

1. As He wept because He knew the real condi¬ 
tion of that city, so to-day we may think the Lord 
Jesus looking upon us sees the condition of our 
hearts. He knows whether those hearts are right 
with God, whether our religion is real or unreal. 
He can tell whether we are striving against our 
weaknesses and our sins, renouncing the temptations 
of the world from whatever source they may arise, 
and taking up our cross and living unto God by the 
grace of His Holy Spirit. 

If we are serving the world instead of serving 
God, if we are following its evil ways instead of 
obeying God’s commandments, He knows it. There 
is nothing hidden from Him. As He looks upon us 
to-day and sees our real condition, what does He 
find? 

2. Then as He wept over Jerusalem because He 
knew the last warning had come to its guilty people 
—so now it may be that He is looking upon some 
who are neglecting His mercy. 

God calls us to repentance. He has been most 
forbearing toward us all. He is not willing that 
any should perish. But the day of grace must have 
its ending, and then comes retribution. What else 
can come if any will not turn away from sin ? 

3. Finally as our Lord wept because He knew 
what the guilty people of Jerusalem must suffer, so 
now we are to remember that the danger of impeni- 


OUR LORD WEEPING OVER SINS OF MEN. 203 

tence must be very great or else so much had not 
been said to us in the way of warning. 

In a certain sense every sermon preached, every 
sickness, sorrow, or bereavement, is a call to a bet¬ 
ter life. 

Some are conscious of many warnings received, 
many opportunities missed, many good resolutions 
formed and broken. 

Consider the privileges and blessings you have, 
the many times God’s Holy Spirit has striven with 
you, and how often you have refused to hear. Be¬ 
ware of grieving that Holy Spirit further. Be not 
obstinate or rebellious. Drift not into a destruction 
not less terrible than that of the devoted city, whose 
people knew not the things belonging to their peace. 


XXXV. 


Holy Week—Monday—the Thirty-fifth Day of 
Lent. 

Nothing but Leaves . 1 

«And when He saw a fig-tree in the way, He came to it, and 
found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let there no 
fruit grow on thee henceforth forever. And presently the fig-tree 
withered away.” —St. Matt. xxi. 19. 

This incident thus described occurred on the 
Monday before the crucifixion—as we Christians 
should say, on Monday of the Holy Week. After 
His solemn entrance into Jerusalem on the previous 
day, our Lord retired to spend the night at Beth¬ 
any, and He was returning to Jerusalem in the 
early morning of our Monday to continue the 
solemn work on which He had entered. There 
was a fig-tree near the road, covered before its 
time with leaves. Our Lord went up to it, says 
St. Mark, “ if haply He might find some fruit on it, 
and He found nothing thereon but leaves only.” 
Upon this He pronounced a curse upon the tree,— 
“ Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for¬ 
ever : ”—“ no man eat fruit of thee hereafter for¬ 
ever.” 

That Monday night when our Lord and the 
Apostles again passed the tree on their road back 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. H. P. Liddon, D. D., at one time 
Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England. 

204 


NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 


205 


to Bethany it was already dark; but as they were 
walking into Jerusalem on Tuesday morning, 
twenty-four hours after the occurrence, the dis¬ 
ciples saw that the fig-tree had become dried up 
from the roots. 

Now, let us try to consider, first, the character of 
our Lord's act on this occasion, and then, if we 
may, its meaning. 

We have, then, before us, first of all and conspic¬ 
uously, an act of superhuman power —an act by 
which Christ, our Lord, illustrated His empire over 
the natural and inanimate world. Our Lord ut¬ 
tered His word, and the fig-tree withered away. 
There is no other act in our Lord’s earthly life 
wfiiich is exactly like this. It is in sharp and un¬ 
deniable contrast to the general character of what 
He did. 

The act before us is symbolical. It means a some¬ 
thing beyond itself, of which it is the symbol. Such 
acts were common in ancient Israel. They were, 
in fact, part of the current language of the ancient 
East. In this case our Lord acted a parable, in¬ 
stead of speaking it. We may reverently suppose 
that He might have said, “ A certain man beheld a 
fig-tree in the way with leaves upon it, and he came 
to it if haply he might find fruit upon it; and when 
he found no fruit thereon but only leaves, he said 
unto it, let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for¬ 
ever; and presently that fig-tree withered away.” 
But, instead of saying this, He expressed it in ac¬ 
tion. He saw before Him an actual fig-tree with 
leaves. He went to it; He noted that it had no 


206 


NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 


fruit; and then He spoke, and at His word the fig- 
tree withered from the root. Action of this kind 
is of itself, and from the nature of the case, more 
vivid—more likely to command attention and to 
fix itself in memory—than language. We may be 
very sure that the disciples did not take their eyes off 
our Lord while He was thus engaged. His action 
was the more remarkable because He brought His 
miraculous power over nature^ directly into play, in 
order thus to illustrate the parable which He was 
acting, and to impress it more deeply on the minds 
of those who witnessed it than it could have been 
impressed by words. 

Yes, our Lord’s action was throughout symbol¬ 
ical. What is the meaning —the practical meaning 
—which lurks beneath, behind the symbol ? 

1. We cannot mistake the reference, first of all, 
to the Israel of our Lord’s day. Israel here as often 
in His parables is in the foreground of His thought. 
Beyond all doubt, in the first place, for Him and 
His disciples, this fig-tree was Israel. This fig-tree 
was an apt figure of the pretentiousness, the self- 
satisfaction, the boastfulness of Israel. Israel had 
leaves enough—the boast in the law, in the Tem¬ 
ple, in the appointed worship, in the ancient cere¬ 
monies, in the great doctors and schools of legal 
learning, in the mechanical and formal piety; but 
fruit Israel had not. He found leaves in prema¬ 
ture, in ostentatious, abundance; and now the end 
was coming, and what took place on the Bethany 
road was an acted parable that shadowed it forth. 
When Israel shed the blood of the Blessed One, the 


NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 


207 


curse, self-invoked on the race, lighted upon it. 
The nation withered spiritually away. The words 
—the awful words—were fulfilled, “ His blood be 
on us and on our children.” That ancient and 
glorious stock on which patriarchs and prophets 
and saints and heroes had grown for many a cen¬ 
tury, and whose crowning distinction it was that 
of it, as concerning the flesh, Christ came who is 
over all, God blessed forever—that honored tree 
was smitten henceforward with a Divine blast that 
dried up all the juices of its life and left it but a 
withered trunk, preserving only the outward form 
of its former self. Forthwith the fig-tree withered 
away. 

2. But Israel is not the only subject of the para¬ 
ble. Our Lord’s words do not thus pass away. 
They are spoken for all nations and for all time. 
Behind Israel we see nations, institutions , churches , 
causes , which promise more than they yield —which 
attract by their leafage—which bear no fruit. 
When a civilization is constantly boasting of its 
progress, of its social improvements, of its adequate 
provision for the earthly happiness of man, while it 
is honeycombed with moral sores at which its eulo¬ 
gists dare not even hint—when an institution or a 
cause trusts rather to its advertisements about do¬ 
ing good than to its solid work—when a church is 
more active on platforms and in the press than in 
striving to promote the Christian faith and life in 
the souls of her people, one by one,—then we have 
before us the fig-tree on the road to Bethany, and 
the end cannot be far. 


208 


NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 


3. And behind institutions are separate souls— 
the souls which make up the institutions, and apart 
from which they are arid abstractions. You and I, 
my brethren, may see in this acted parable a solemn 
word addressed to ourselves. Now, as of old, Jesus, 
our Redeemer, hungers for spiritual fruit. As He 
thirsted for our salvation when He hung upon the 
cross, so He desires, with an eagerness which we 
can best express in the poor language of sense, 
something to show that there has been a true work 
of God in the soul—the fruits of the holy, indwell¬ 
ing Spirit—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle¬ 
ness, goodness, meekness, temperance. This, surely, 
is a most invigorating and withal awful consider¬ 
ation—that there is a Being whom we do not see, 
whose eye is ever upon us, who knows all about 
us, who desires earnestly, constantly, moment by 
moment, that our separate lives should be produc¬ 
tive. He comes to us—He comes sooner or later 
to each of us—as He came to the leafy and fruitless 
fig-tree on the road to Bethany. Others, even those 
who know us best—cannot come so near to us as 
He comes. Others see appearances; they do not 
penetrate to the realities. They see a respectable 
or religious bearing, regular and pious habits, 
works, which are, at least, in their form and effect, 
good works. So far, well. But He sees beyond 
these leaves, deeper and clearly, down into the 
centre of the soul. What is the fruit which He 
would find there now f Will He find a living faith, 
a strong hope, a warm love of God and of man, a 
true repentance for past sins, a desire to do God’s 


NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 


209 


will simply and purely, and to let human judgments 
about us take of themselves ? What would He 
find? Would He find only an interest in religious 
questions of the day—only a taste for Church 
music or Church architecture—only an aptitude for 
controversy—only a devotion to the literary aspects 
of Scripture—to its history, to its antiquities, to its 
poetry, to its language, to phrases; to practices, to 
habits which friends and usage and association pre¬ 
scribe ; but nothing more, nothing deeper, nothing 
strictly internal to and inseparable from the soul, 
nothing that He would deem fruit and not mere 
leaves ? 

Let us be looking out for the visit which will, 
sooner or later, be paid by Him, our Lord, to us, 
that when He comes to us He may find through 
His own transforming and invigorating grace the 
realities, and not the mere semblance, of a life of 
service—not merely leaves but fruit. 


XXXYI. 


Holy Week—Tuesday—the Thirty-sixth day 
of Lent. 

The Great Remedy . 1 

“ And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and 
it came to pass that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld 
the serpent of brass, he lived.”— Numbers xxi. 9. 

About three thousand years ago, the people of 
Israel were engaged in their long journey from the 
land of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan. 
That was a most eventful journey. God was 
plainly with them helping them through all their 
difficulties, leading them onward, and showing them 
daily mercies. And yet we find constant symp¬ 
toms of the deepest ingratitude toward their heav¬ 
enly Friend. We have a remarkable instance of 
this in the chapter before us, from which the text 
is taken. We read that “they journeyed from 
Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea, to compass 
the land of Edom; and the soul of the people was 
much discouraged because of the way. And the 
people spake against Moses, Wherefore have ye 
brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilder¬ 
ness ? For there is no bread, neither is there any 

1 From a sermon by the Rt. Rev. A. Oxenden, D. D., at one time 
Metropolitan Bishop of Canada. 

210 


THE GREAT REMEDY. 


211 


water; and our soul loathetli this light bread.” 
They were not content with the manna, Avhich God 
so graciously sent them from heaven. 

Now see how He punished them for their mur¬ 
muring and unthankfulness. “ And the Lord sent 
fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the 
people, and much people of Israel died.” This was 
an awful punishment and they felt they deserved 
it. What was to be done ? They were dying by 
hundreds, and they knew of no remedy to save 
them. “ Therefore the people came to Moses, and 
said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against 
the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, 
that He take away the serpents from us. And 
Moses prayed for the people.” Now observe God’s 
answer. He does not remove those venomous ser¬ 
pents from among them; but He offers a remedy, 
if only they were ready to use it. “ And the Lord 
said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set 
it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every 
one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it shall 
live.”- 

How gracious was God in thus providing a 
remedy for His disobedient but still beloved people; 
a remedy just suited to their wants! There they 
lay, writhing with agony and exhausted with pain. 
The moment they were bitten they knew too well 
that no power of man could relieve them. Their 
case then seemed utterly hopeless. But now Moses 
is directed to make a Serpent of Brass, and to raise 
it upon a high pole, so that every dying man who 
turned his eyes that way, might see it. And who- 


212 


THE GREAT REMEDY. 


ever looked at this lifeless serpent was instantly 
healed. 

Here then, we have a very interesting event in 
the history of God’s people, Israel. But is there 
not something more in it ? Have we not some¬ 
thing here which speaks to us of a crucified Sav¬ 
iour? Turn to St. John iii. 14, and you will see. 

There our Lord tells us that “ As Moses lifted up 
the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son 
of Man be lifted up, that whosoever belie veth in 
Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” 

I think it will be interesting to us to trace out 
the likeness between the state of the Israelites and 
our state—between their remedy and ours. 

First, there is some resemblance between their 
disease and ours. We have seen that they were 
bitten by fiery serpents. There was a deadly 
poison. This probably brought on a burning fever 
in those who were bitten, and they died in the 
greatest agony. And is there not a deadly venom 
which poisons our nature ? Sin is the poison which 
brings suffering and death. There is spiritual 
death among us. Souls are dying around us. Men 
are passing from this light-hearted, thoughtless 
world into misery and woe. 

And is there no hope, then ? Was there no hope 
for the Israelites? God provided a merciful remedy 
for them, and so He has for us. 

Let us see, then, secondly, the resemblance be¬ 
tween their remedy and ours. 

1. It was God Himself who devised this cure 
for the Israelites. Their disease was beyond the 


THE GREAT REMEDY. 


213 


skill of man. Physicians could do them no good. 
No medicine had power to relieve their agony. But 
God brought them help in their great misery. And 
so it has been with us. God looked upon us in our 
lost and ruined state. He pitied us in our helpless¬ 
ness, and devised the most glorious remedy for our 
salvation. Neither you, nor I, nor any man living 
could have escaped from this deadly disease, this 
misery into which sin had brought us, if God had 
not given His own Son to be our deliverer. 
“ Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that 
He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitia¬ 
tion for our sins.” (1 John iv. 10.) 

2. Then there is another resemblance between 
their remedy and ours. The Brazen Serpent was 
in itself a very unlikely method of cure. One 
would have expected that God would have directed 
them to some plant which they might apply to 
their wounds; He might have pointed out some 
herb, the juice of which they were to drink ; or He 
might have told Moses to speak the word and they 
would be healed. But no, He bids him simply to 
make a Serpent of Brass and to hold it up before 
them. 

And what is the great Gospel Remedy ? Is it not 
folly in the world’s eyes ? What did the Jews think 
of Christ ? He was “ despised and rejected ” by them. 
There are numbers now, as there ever were, who 
from their very hearts despise the Cross. “ The 
preaching of the Cross ” (says the Apostle) “ is to 
them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are 
saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. i. 18.) 


214 


THE GREAT REMEDY. 


3. But let us look again, and we shall find an¬ 
other point of resemblance between the two rem¬ 
edies. You will observe that the remedy which 
cured the Israelites, was made in the same shape as 
that which wounded them. Fiery serpents had 
poisoned them, and a glittering brass serpent was 
to restore them. 

And this reminds us that, although our blessed 
Lord was free from all taint of sin, yet He was 
made in “ the likeness of sinful flesh.” St. Paul 
says that He was “ made sin for us, that we might 
be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor. 
v. 21.) 

4. Again, the Brazen Serpent was lifted up, and 
so was Christ. It was not enough that the Son of 
God should leave His throne in heaven and become 
a wanderer upon earth. It was not enough that 
He should lay aside His glory for a time, and take 
upon Himself the nature of suffering man. This 
would not have purged our sins. There was a debt 
to pay which His blood alone could wipe off. He 
must die. He must be lifted up upon the cross. 
These were His words as the time of His death drew 
near, “ How is the judgment of this world; now is 
the prince of this world judged. And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, w T ill draw all men unto 
Me. This He said signifying what death He should 
die.” (John xii. 31-33.) 

What a wonder! The Lord of glory treated 
with shame ! The Prince of life dying ! He who 
created us, He who came to redeem us, yielding up 
His life that He might purchase for us that pardon 


THE GREAT REMEDY. 


215 


which we so little deserved, and yet so greatly 
needed! 

By faith we look on Him who is unseen. By 
faith our souls rest on Him who is far out of 
sight. By faith we look on Him whom we “ have 
pierced and mourn.” Our crucified Redeemer 
seems to say to each of us, “ Look unto Me and be 
ye saved, for I am God, and none else, and beside 
me there is no Saviour.” Hot an Israelite died who 
looked upon the brazen serpent; and not one soul 
was ever disappointed that looked to Christ for 
everlasting life. He came to seek and to save 
“ that which was lost.” His gracious language is, 
“ Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast 
out.” 


XXXYII. 


Holy Week—Wednesday—the Thirty-seventh 
Day of Lent. 

The Solitude of Christ in Redemption . 1 

u Oh, go not far from me, for trouble is hard at hand, and there is 
none to help me.”— Psalms xxii. n. 

This is one of the cries of the ideal sufferer, of 
whose agonies, both of mind and body, we have so 
complete a picture in this twenty-second Psalm. 

In this Psalm there is one feature of our Lord's 
sufferings upon which particular stress is laid: I 
mean His desolation or solitude. It is the keynote 
of the Psalm, the very first words of which com¬ 
plain, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” 
It finds expression again and again, nowhere, per¬ 
haps, more pathetically than in the cry, “Oh, go 
not far from me, for trouble is hard at hand, and 
there is none to help me.” Some centuries after 
David a figure passed before the soul of the great¬ 
est of the prophets, which shadowed out this aspect 
of a superhuman suffering, but from another point 
of view. It was the form of one coming as from 
Edom—coming along the wonted road of Israel’s 
deliverance—coming with garments died in the 
vintage of Bozrah, emblems of a struggle which 

1 From a sermon by the Rev. H. P. Liddon, D. D., once Canon of 
St. Paul’s Cathedral. 


216 


SOLITUDE OF CUEIST IN KEDEMPTION. 217 

meant wounds and blood, glorious in His apparel— 
His moral apparel of righteousness and mercy—and 
traveling in the greatness of His strength. And 
when the seer gazed intently at this figure and 
asked who He was, the reply came, “ I that speak 
in righteousness, mighty to save.” And when a 
further question was ventured—“ Why art Thou 
red in Thine apparel, and Thy garments like him 
that treadeth in the winefat ? ” it was answered, as 
though this were of the very essence of the conflict, 
“I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the 
people there was none beside Me.” Yes, in His suf¬ 
ferings Jesus was alone—alone in spirit, though en¬ 
compassed by a multitude. In His passion He ex¬ 
perienced a threefold solitude—the solitude of great¬ 
ness , the solitude of sorrow, and the solitude of death. 

The loneliness of the great is one of the ironies 
of human life. The great are lonely because they 
are great—because, had they peers and companions 
they would cease to be what they are, at least in 
relation to those around them. This holds good of 
greatness in all its forms, whether greatness of sta¬ 
tion, or greatness of genius, or greatness of char¬ 
acter. 

How our Lord in His passion was great in various 
ways. He was indeed, as it seemed to the eye of 
sense, a very scorn of men and the outcast of the 
people; and yet, as He said before Pilate, He was a 
king, and He felt, as no other can ever have felt, 
the isolation of royalty. His mental eye took in 
vaster horizons than were ever suspected to exist to 
any around Him. He had meat to eat that they 


218 SOLITUDE OF CHRIST IN REDEMPTION. 

knew not of. In this, as in so many other ways, 
He lived in a sphere of thought which was for them 
impossible. And, above all, in character He was 
not merely courageous, true, disinterested, loving, 
and all these in a degree which distanced the high¬ 
est excellence around Him: He was also that which 
no other human form had been before, or has been 
since: He was sinless. And thus, as He went forth 
to die, He was in a moral, and an intellectual, and a 
social solitude—a solitude created by the very pre¬ 
rogatives of His being. His elevation above His 
fellows itself cut Him off from that sympathy which 
equals can most effectually give. And hence one 
motive of the prayer of His human soul in the 
Psalm, “ Oh, go not far from Me, for trouble is hard 
at hand, and there is none to help Me.” 

There is the solitude of greatness, my brethren, 
but there is also the solitude of sorrow. Certainly, 
sorrow is a link of human fellowship. Sooner or 
later all men suffer. “ Man is born to trouble as 
the sparks fly upward.” Ho condition of life, no 
variety of temperament, can purchase exemption 
from the universal law of suffering. To some it 
comes as the chastening which is necessary to per¬ 
fection ; to others it comes as the penalty which is 
due to sin; but sooner or later, in whatever sense, 
it comes to all. And yet, though suffering is thus 
universal, no two human beings suffer exactly alike. 
There is the same individuality in the pain which 
each man suffers, that there is in his thought, in his 
character, in his countenance. Ho two men, since 
the world began, among the millions of sufferers, 


SOLITUDE OF CUEIST IN EEDEMPTION. 219 

have repeated exactly the same experience. And 
this is why human sympathy, even at its best, is 
never quite perfect. No one merely human being 
can put himself exactly by that act of the moral 
imagination which we call sympathy, in all the cir¬ 
cumstances of another human being. Each sufferer, 
whether of bodily or of mental pain, pursues a sep¬ 
arate path, encounters peculiar difficulties, shares a 
common burden, but is alone in his sorrow. 

And especially was our Lord solitary in His awful 
sorrow. We may well believe that the delicate 
sensibilities of His bodily frame rendered Him liable 
to physical tortures such as ruder natures can never 
know. But we know this—that the mode of His 
death was exceptionally painful, and yet His bodily 
sufferings were less terrible, so it might seem, than 
the sufferings of His mind. His agony in the gar¬ 
den was of a character which distances altogether 
human woe. Our Lord advisedly laid Himself open 
to the dreadful visitation. He embraced it as by a 
deliberate act. He began to be sorrowful and very 
heavy. He took upon Him the burden and misery 
of human sin—the sins of all the centuries that had 
preceded and that would follow Him—that He 
might take it to the cross and expiate it in death. 
As the Apostle says, “ He bore our sins in His own 
body on the tree.” But the touch of this burden, 
which to you and to me is so familiar, was agony 
to Him. It drew from Him the bloody sweat which 
fell from His forehead on the turf of Gethsemane 
hours before they crowned Him with the thorns or 
nailed Him to the cross. 


220 SOLITUDE OF CHRIST IIS' REDEMPTION. 

And lastly there is the solitude of death. Death, 
whenever it comes to any man, must be an act in 
which no other man can share. It strips from a 
man all that connects him with that which is with¬ 
out him. It is an act in which his consciousness, is, 
from the nature of the case, thrown back into itself 
and absorbed in that which is happening to itself. 
When the soul, by a wrench which no experience 
can possibly anticipate, breaks away from the bodily 
organism with which, since its creation, it has been 
so intimately linked, it enters upon a lonely path, 
which may indeed be brightened by the voices and 
the smiles of angels, but into which no human sym¬ 
pathy can follow. 

In the death of our Lord Himself it might be sup¬ 
posed that this sense of solitude would be escaped. 
Living in hourly communion with the Father, sur¬ 
rounded by hosts of angel guardians, how, we may 
ask, could He taste of the solitude of death ? Was 
not His human nature so united to His Divinity that 
even in death, the union was not forfeited ? And 
how is this reconcilable with the supposition that 
He experienced the loneliness of dying as we men 
experience it ? The answer is that our Lord by a 
deliberate act became obedient unto death. What¬ 
ever might have been the law of His being, as a sin¬ 
less man united to a higher nature, He did not, if I 
may so dare to say, claim its privileges, but laid 
Himself open without reserve or stint to all the ills 
to which our flesh is heir, without at all escaping 
its lowest and its last humiliations. He selected as 
the mode of dying that which conspicuously in- 


SOLITUDE OF CHRIST IN REDEMPTION. 221 

volved most pain and shame, and He would not, 
most assuredly, defeat His purpose by sparing Him¬ 
self that accompaniment of death which causes so 
much apprehension to us sinful men—its solitariness. 
He might have prayed His father for twelve legions 
of angels, but He would not then be alone. He 
might have enjoyed unceasingly the joy, at least, of 
those who always behold the face of the Father in 
heaven. He willed to share the misery of the souls 
who cry in their last moments—some, we may be 
sure, every day that passes—“ My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me ? ” He submitted Him¬ 
self to all these elements of our nature which sterner 
characters affect to scorn—to its sense of depend¬ 
ence—to its craving for sympathy—to its conscious¬ 
ness of weakness. “ Oh, go not far from me, for 
trouble is hard at hand, and there is none to help 
me,” is the natural language of the feeblest sufferer; 
but it was the language also of our Divine Saviour, 
contemplating’ with a true human apprehension, the 
loneliness of approaching death. 

We see in the solitude of Jesus crucified a war¬ 
rant of His constant sympathy with the dying. 
“ In that He Himself hath suffered, being tempted, 
He is able to succor them that are tempted.” Noth¬ 
ing that we may experience in His gracious provi¬ 
dence—no anguish of soul—no weariness or torture 
of body—has been unexplored by Him who over¬ 
came all the sharpness of death, before He opened 
the kingdom of heaven to the great company of the 
faithful. 

May He take pity upon us as sinful and erring, 


222 SOLITUDE OF CHRIST IN REDEMPTION. 

yet believing children, and suffer us not at our last 
hour, for any pains of death, to fall from Him. 
May He look upon us with the eyes of His mercy, 
and give us comfort and sure confidence in Him, 
and defend us from the dangers of the enemy, and 
so bring us safely to our eternal home, for His own 
infinite merits. 


XXXYIII. 


Holy Week—Thursday—the Thirty-Eighth Day 
of Lent. 

“The Night in which He was Betrayed .” 1 

“ When Jesus knew that His hour was come that He should depart 
out of this world.”— St. John xiii. i. 

We are not told how Jesus spent Wednesday, for 
the supper in the house at Bethany was on Tuesday 
evening. He apparently stayed in privacy, await¬ 
ing the coming day. 

On Thursday morning the disciples, taking it for 
granted that He would celebrate the feast with 
them, came to Him early to receive instructions. 
No doubt the disciples expected that Bethany would 
be chosen, for He had solemnly turned away from 
Jerusalem two days before, and to go thither again 
would be to put Himself in the power of His en¬ 
emies. But He had resolved to visit the city so 
dear to Him once more. It was the place appointed 
by the Law for the feast, and He would there be in 
the midst of the rejoicing multitudes, as Himself a 
son of Israel. He wished, also, to throw a greater 
sacredness over the institution He designed to inau¬ 
gurate that night, as the equivalent, in the New 
Kingdom of God, of the Passover in the Old. 

The Passover meal was now virtually finished, 

1 From the Rev. Dr. C. Geikie’s “ Life and Words of Christ.” 


223 


224 NIGHT IN WHICH HE WAS BETRAYED. 

when the warning had been given of the approach¬ 
ing denial of their Master by Peter, and the weak- 
minded desertion of the Eleven. The solemn words, 
foretelling the dangers and trials before them, had 
been added, when Jesus introduced by an act be¬ 
fitting a spiritual religion like His, in its simplicity, 
the institution which, henceforth, should supersede 
in His kingdom on earth the feast they had ended. 
Homage had been paid for the last time, as in fare¬ 
well, to the Past: they were hereafter to honor the 
new Symbol of the Future. 

He was about to leave them, and as yet they had 
no right, however simple, to form a centre round 
which they might permanently gather. Some em¬ 
blem was needed by which they might, hereafter, 
be distinguished; some common bond which should 
outwardly link them to each other and to their 
common Master. The Passover had been the sym¬ 
bol of the theocracy of the past, and had given the 
people of God an outward, ever-recurring remem¬ 
brance of their relations to each other and to their 
invisible King. As the founder of the Hew Israel, 
Jesus would now institute a special rite for its 
members, in all ages and countries. The Old Cove¬ 
nant of God with the Jew had found its vivid em¬ 
bodiment in the yearly festivity He had that night, 
for the last time, observed. The Hew Covenant 
must, henceforth, have an outward embodiment 
also; more spiritual as became it but equally vivid. 

Nothing could have been move touching and beauti¬ 
ful in its simplicity than the symbol now introduced. 
The Third Cup was known as “ the cup of blessing ” 


NIGHT IN WHICH HE WAS BETRAYED. 225 

and had marked the close of the meal, held to do 
honor to the economy now passing away. The 
bread had been handed around with the words, 
“ This is the bread of affliction : ” and the flesh of 
the lamb had been distributed with the words, 
“ This is the body of the Passover.’’ The feast of 
the Ancient People of God having been honored by 
these striking utterances,—Jesus took one of the 
loaves or cakes before Him, and gave thanks, broke 
it, and handed it to the Apostles with words, the 
repetition almost exactly, of those they had heard 
a moment before—“ Take, eat; this is My body 
which is given for you: this do in remembrance of 
Me.” Then, taking the cup, which had been filled 
for the fourth and last handing around, He gave 
thanks to God once more, and passed it to the circle 
with the words, “ Drink ye all of it, for this cup is 
the New Covenant ” presently to be made “ in My 
blood ”; instead of the covenant made also in 
blood, by God, with your fathers. “It is,” in 
abiding symbol, “ My blood of the Covenant ”; of 
My Father, with the New Israel, “ which is shed for 
you and for many for the remission of sins. This 
do, as often as ye drink, in remembrance of Me.” 

For Himself He declined to taste it. “ I will not 
drink henceforth,” said He, “ of the fruit of the 
vine ”—for it was still only wine—“ till that day, 
when, at the end of all things, the kingdom of 
God, which I have founded, shall finally triumph, 
and My followers be gathered to the great heavenly 
feast. Then, I shall drink it new, with you and 
them.” 


226 NIGHT IN WHICH HE WAS BETEAYED. 

Such, and so simple, was the new rite of the 
Spiritual Theocracy. To those around Him, at its 
institution, there could be no doubt of its meaning 
and nature, for it was, even in words, a counterpart 
of that which He had superseded , with a purer and 
more spiritual form . The cup, He told them, was 
a symbol of the Hew Covenant, ryider which, as 
His followers, they had come; in distinction from 
that which they had left for His sake. It was to 
be a memorial of Him , and a constant recognition 
of their faith in the virtue of His atoning death — 
that death, whose shed blood was the seal of this 
Hew Covenant between the subjects of His kingdom 
and God, His Father. It symbolized before all 
ages, to the Hew Israel, the cardinal virtue of His 
death. The Apostles could have had no simpler or 
more unmistakable intimation that as the blood of 
the Passover lamb redeemed the people of God, of 
old, from the sword of the angel of wrath, His 
blood would be a ransom for man from a far 
deadlier peril. A covenant to them implied a 
sacrifice, and His blood, as the Hew Covenant, 
was, therefore, sacrificial; the blood of a covenant 
which pledged His followers to faith and duty ; 
the blood of a new paschal lamb with which His 
disciples must, in figure, be sprinkled, that the de¬ 
stroying angel might pass over them in the day of 
judgment. 

The custom of the nation to make a common 
meal the special occasion of religious fellowship, 
made the new institution easy and natural to the 
Apostles, and the constant use of symbols in their 


NIGHT IN WHICH HE WAS BETRAYED. 227 

hereditary religion prevented their misconceiving 
the meaning of those now introduced for the first 
time. They saw in it an abiding memorial of their 
Lord : a vivid enforcement of their dependence on 
the merits of His death, as a sacrifice for their sal¬ 
vation : the need of intimate spiritual communion 
with Him, as the bread of life: and the bond of 
the new brotherhood He had established. The 
joint commemoration of His broken body and shed 
blood was, henceforth, to distinguish the assemblies 
of His followers from the world at large. Except¬ 
ing baptism, it was the one outward form in the 
Society, established by their Master. 

It was late in the night of Thursday when Jesus 
had ended His last discourse and farewell prayer. 
According to the immemorial custom of the nation 
to mingle songs of praise to God with their feasts, 
the little band had already sung the first two of 
the six Psalms—the one hundred and thirteenth 
to the one hundred and eighteenth—which formed 
the great Hallelujah of the Passover and all other 
feasts. The stillness of the night had been broken 
by the sound at the time when the second cup had 
been poured out. How, at the close, the voices of 
the eldest of them chanted, with slow, solemn 
strains, the remainder of the Hallelujah—the rest 
responding with the word, Hallelujah, at the close 
of each verse. The anthem began fitly—“ Hot 
unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory, 
for Thy mercy and for Thy truth’s sake,” and closed 
with the words of the one hundred and eighteenth 
Psalm—“ Blessed be he that cometh in the name of 


228 NIGHT IN WHICH HE WAS BETRAYED. 

Jehovah; ” the Apostles responding—“ In the name 
of Jehovah, Hallelujah! ” And now, all was over, 
and the Eleven, following their Master, went out 
into the night. They were on their way to Geth- 
semane. 

He was to give His life a ransom for man: to be 
made an offering for sin, though He knew none: to 
be repaid for infinite love and goodness by igno¬ 
miny and shame. Perfect innocence freely yield¬ 
ing itself to misconception and death, for the 
unworthy and vile, would be transcendent even 
in a man, but in the Son of God! Who can tell 
what it was to have left the right hand of the 
Majesty in the heavens to stoop to Calvary!—for 
Him who could raise the dead to descend to the 
tomb! 


XXXIX. 


Holy Week—Good Friday—the Thirty-ninth 
Day of Lent. 

The Cross the Key of Life . 1 

“ For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust 
that He might bring us to God.”—i Peter iii. 18. 

We to-day commemorate the world’s supreme 
tragedy. Let me ask you to see in the Cross of 
Christ the key of human life, and observe how it 
admits us to a solution of certain dark mysteries of 
existence. 

In the first place, it shows us the Perfect Man 
crucified —“ Christ hath also suffered . . . the 

Just.” You may ask me why trouble has come 
upon you. You are confident you are no worse 
than your neighbor. Why should your hopes have 
been so mocked, your dreams end in so rude an 
awakening? Why should your means have been 
swept from you, or health be denied you, or the 
light of your eyes taken away ? What have you 
done to be doomed to such disappointment and 
failure, to perpetual poverty, or infirmity and pain, 
or grief and desolation ? Such questions I may 
not be able to answer. But I can point you to the 
fact that the very best man that ever lived on earth 

1 From “ The Key of Life ” Meditations by the Rt. Rev. C. B. 
Brewster, D. D., Bishop of Connecticut. 


229 


230 


THE CKOSS THE KEY OF LIFE. 


—the Perfect Man, the Sinless One, who had no 
consciousness of sin, who in Himself knew no sin 
and was in character separate from sinners—that 
He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
grief ; that He was despised and rejected; that He 
suffered cruel things; that upon Him, who had 
done nothing amiss, but contrariwise lived a life of 
blessedness and blessing, came the excruciating tor¬ 
ments, the unspeakable shame, the untold agony of 
the Cross. 

2. Hot only did the Perfect Man suffer, but 
only so could He accomplish His great work and 
attain the consummation wherefore He came , He 
became perfect through sufferings. “Though He 
were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things 
which He suffered.” It behooved Him to suffer 
these things, and so to enter into His glory. Thus 
the Cross yields an explanation of life. It is the 
solution of some of its most baffling perplexities, a 
key to open to the light some of its darkest and 
most appalling chambers. It reveals that law of 
life—perfect through sufferings. What illumina¬ 
tion it casts on the spectacle of the world, making 
its contemplation a different sight! What a revo¬ 
lution it has wrought in living, making it a differ¬ 
ent thing to suffer the manifold ills that flesh is 
heir to! This King, wearing a crown of thorns, 
marching with royal tread the way of Sorrow, and 
choosing for His throne a cross, transmutes pain, 
transfigures anguish, and consecrates sorrow for¬ 
ever. The ignominious instrument of infamy, the 
gibbet of that day, is to-day signed*on the brow T of 


THE CROSS THE KEY OE LIFE, 


231 


God’s children, and lifted aloft on heavenward 
spires. It has become the cherished symbol of dis¬ 
cipline to noblest uses, of culture for destined glory. 
It brings its message, which is a gospel, to the soul 
called to bear much, that it may be much; the 
branch sharply pruned that it may bring forth 
more fruit; the chosen image hewn and chiselled 
to the desired beauty. 

3. Again the Cross reveals a far-reaching and 
uplifting law of the universe—the law of sacrifice . 
That sacrifice of Christ, that sublime losing of His 
life, illustrates and glorifies with its illumination 
how much of the sufferings of mankind borne for 
others! The mother for her child, the nurse or 
physician for the patient, the brave fireman for the 
imperiled community, the soldier for his country, 
the martyr for the Church—these all, sacrificing 
self for others, receive a new glory from the Cross 
of our Lord Jesus Christ and its great sacrifice. 
Thence streams a radiant light for many a dark¬ 
ened chamber, many a couch of suffering or habita¬ 
tion of sorrow. Every one who is called to en¬ 
dure, whether it be disciple set apart to the bearing 
of much pain, or grief-stricken soul in the midst of 
sore affliction, or hero “¥ the imminent deadly 
breach,” or martyr at the stake, each may enter 
into the inspiration of Christ’s sacrifice. 

4. There is in the world's great tragedy a further 
revelation. What was its cause ? What is working 
through all the piteous story ? What was it inspir¬ 
ing the base traitor seeking to betray the Master, 
the priests and Pharisees plotting His ruin, the 


232 


THE CROSS THE KEY OF LIFE. 


mutual foes confederate against Him, the mocking 
Herod, the vacillating governor, the weak friend 
denying Him, the brutal soldiery, the cruel tiger of 
the mob thirsting and roaring for His blood ? 
What wrought against Him but that baseness in 
human blood, that perversion of human will, that 
disloyalty to conscience, that malignant and des¬ 
perate derangement of humanity, that something 
which separates men from and arrays them against 
good, that something which puts self in place of 
God, that something inexplicable yet undeniable 
which we call sin ? From the Cross we may learn 
lessons about the principle, the inner nature , the es¬ 
sential wickedness , the sinfulness of sin. Here is 
the sinless One, and sin murders Him; the sinless 
One, and He “ suffered for sins ” ; the Son of God, 
incarnate righteousness, and the forces of evil cry, 
“ Away with Him! Crucify Him ! ” Thus is the 
Cross of the Son of God a measure, better than any 
other measure, of that wickedness wherein the 
whole world lieth, and which demanded such a 
sacrifice. 

4. Looking more deeply, we see in the Cross the 
revelation of Divine love coping with the world's 
evil. God so loved the world that He has not 
withheld His Son, His only Son. We see Divine 
love undergoing the transcendent sacrifice. We 
see Divine love suffering with men—yes, suffering 
for men. We see Divine righteousness dying the 
death of sin. Thus the Cross explains God. God 
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. 
We see revealed, behind all, a Father sending His 


THE CROSS THE KEY OF LIFE. 233 

Son to die, that we might receive the adoption of 
sons. If the Cross was the measure of the world’s 
iniquity, it is also the measure of the length and 
breadth and depth and height of the Divine love 
that passeth knowledge. If it revealed the sinful¬ 
ness of sin, it reveals also Divine redemption from 
sin. It proclaims Divine love conquering sin by 
sacrifice for sinners. It proclaims pardon for sin 
and cleansing from sin. It releases from sin in 
order to reconcile to God. He was wounded for 
our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniqui¬ 
ties, in order that nothing might separate us from 
God. He “suffered for sins, the just for the un¬ 
just, that He might bring us to God ”—to God, the 
transcendent mystery, but also the supreme reality; 
life’s source and centre and goal, to whom we owe 
all, and in whom we find all, that gives worth to 
life. 

Thus is the Cross the key of life. It solves the 
great enigma, the riddle of the painful earth. It 
admits to those profound laws underlying the 
world’s suffering—discipline through pain, further¬ 
ance thereof by cooperation of one’s own will, fel¬ 
lowship in suffering, sacrifice for others, death 
through sin, Divine love redeeming from sin, man’s 
privilege by sacrificial service to draw nigh to 
God. 

Who can behold the Cross of Christ and not be 
touched, and touched to finer issues ? Look to the 
Cross of Christ. See the light that thence traverses 
human life, that shines upon your life! It may 
seem all dark before you; life may seem dull and 


234 THU CROSS THU KEY OF LIFU. 

empty, meaningless, hopeless, wretched, desperate, 
even a horror of great darkness. Come ! Follow 
on the King’s highway of the holy Cross, and you 
shall find it a way to make life intelligible and en¬ 
durable, so that you may mourn but will not mur¬ 
mur, suffer but not repine, grieve but not rebel, be 
tried and tempted but not sin. 

The Cross is the key of life. It solves life’s mys¬ 
teries. It admits us to life’s inner meaning. .Rec¬ 
onciled to existence, we begin to enter into its true 
joy. We are redeemed to God from selfishness and 
sin. We are won to the Divine love and holiness. 
We are reconciled to God, and made at one with 
Him. 



XL. 


Holy Week—Saturday—the Fortieth Day of 
Lent. 

In Paradise . 1 

“ To-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.”—S t. Luke xxiii. 43. 

The dying thief on the cross prayed to onr Lord 
to remember him when He came into His Kingdom. 
The prompt reply was a promise that the penitent 
one should that day be with Him in Paradise. 
What and where is this Paradise of which Jesus 
speaks f We cannot definitely say what it is or 
where it is. Ho distinct revelation of it has been 
made; and it is only by some slight hints and 
symbols, that we learn anything concerning it. 
The Persian word Ferradis , from which our word 
“ Paradise ” is borrowed, means simply a pleasure- 
garden, a place of physical rest and enjoyment, 
surrounded by all that can minister pleasure to the 
mind or body. Hence the word has come to mean 
a place of supreme felicity, unalloyed by pain or 
sin. The word is used only three times in the Hew 
Testament,—once in connection with the thief on 
the cross; once by St. Paul, where he tells the 
Corinthians that he was “ caught up into Paradise ” ; 
and once by St. John, where he speaks of the tree 

1 From a sermon by the Rt. Rev. William Bacon Stevens, D. D., 
formerly Bishop of Pennsylvania. 


235 


m 


m PARADISE. 


of life, “which is in the midst of the Paradise of 
God.” In the Septuagint the word “ Eden ” is ren¬ 
dered “ Paradise ” and hence it has ever been used 
to express the abode of Adam and Eve in a state of 
innocence and bliss. Milton has emphasized this 
word in his immortal poems of “Paradise Lost” 
and “ Paradise Kegained,” lifting it up far above 
the Elysium of the Komans, or the Hesperides of 
the Greeks, the trees of which bore golden fruit. 
All the Scripture teaches us is simply this: that 
God has established it, hence called “ the Paradise 
of God ”; that it has in it “ the tree of life,” and 
hence must be a place of living souls; a human be¬ 
ing has been taken up to it, and returned to earth, 
but He could not say, “ whether in the body or out 
of the body,” and has not given us one syllable of 
information as to what or where the place is; that 
Jesus Himself went directly from earth to Paradise; 
that He was soon joined there by the dying thief; 
and that, according to our Lord’s answer to the 
prayer of the thief, it is a part of Christ’s kingdom. 
These are all the facts that we know about Paradise, 
and from them we are, I think, warranted in say¬ 
ing that the Paradise into which Jesus went is the 
place where , immediately after death , the souls of 
the righteous , “ after they are delivered from the 
burden of the flesh f go , and where they are at rest. 
It is the waiting-place of the disembodied spirits of 
the just, until they shall “ be clothed upon ” by 
their resurrection-body. It is not a state of sleep¬ 
ing unconsciousness, as some suppose, but of pure 
conscious enjoyment, free from all taint of sorrow 


IN PARADISE. 


237 


or of sin. We do, indeed, speak of sleeping in 
Jesus, and our graveyards are called cemeteries 
( i . e.y sleeping-places) but the terms were only used 
to convey the idea that the dead were unconscious 
as to the things of this life, as those who sleep 
soundly are unconscious of their surroundings. To 
the living, the dead are as asleep. They hear us not, 
speak not to us, walk not with us; but the dead 
themselves are not asleep as to their own conscious¬ 
ness. Unclogged by the fetters of time and earth 
and sense, their souls have a wakefulness never be¬ 
fore felt, and never to slumber again. Their spir¬ 
itual activity now for the first time finds its full 
energy and power, and every instinct of the soul is 
quickened into newness of life. 

Paradise, then, is the place where the souls of the 
righteous dead are assembled till they are rehabili¬ 
tated with their spiritual bodies at the resurrection. 

But in what does the happiness of this Paradise 
consist f Ah, in the precious words, “ present with 
the Lord,” lies the whole happiness of Paradise ! 

Well may St. Paul say, “I have a desire to de¬ 
part and be with Christ, which is far better ” than 
to tarry in the flesh. Yes, to be “with Christ,” 
that is supreme felicity. It is not the mere rest 
after toil, it is not the mere absence of temptation 
and sin, it is not the exemption from pain and woe 
and tears, it is not the possession of purer and 
higher faculties of mind and soul, it is not the 
splendor and glory of the future heavenly habita¬ 
tions, it is not the companionship of angels and 
archangels, it is not the celestial music such as the 


238 


IN PARADISE. 


blessed only can make, it is not its perpetual bright¬ 
ness and its unceasing worship, it is not either or 
all of these combined which make the true bliss of 
the redeemed. 

But that which overtops all, that which is better 
than all, that which more than all else will fill and 
satisfy the soul, is to be with Christ. 

The simple difference between Paradise and 
Heaven , which are two distinct states and condi¬ 
tions, is this: In Paradise the soul exists as a pure, 
spiritual, incorporeal essence. Possessing its full 
powers, and exercising its powers as far as its con¬ 
dition permits, full of conscious life, full of perfect 
bliss, fixed in moral character as to its future ex¬ 
istence, but waiting to be “ clothed upon,” as the 
apostle expresses it, with our house (or tabernacle 
or abiding-place), “ which is from heaven ”; com¬ 
plete as to all moral and spiritual qualities and 
powers, but yet lacking the presence of the resur¬ 
rection-body, that incorruptible, that glorious, that 
spiritual body, fashioned like unto Jesus’ own resur¬ 
rection-body, with which the disembodied spirits 
in Paradise will be invested, when the trumpet 
shall sound, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. 
Then, the soul, clad in its spiritual body, over which 
sin and death can have no power, will have, not 
new powers, but new instruments for the display of 
its powers; new organs of spiritual existence and 
enjoyment; new methods of intercourse with its 
heavenly surroundings; new avenues of communion 
with angels and archangels; and thus, through its 
celestial body, be put in full accord and correspond- 


IN PARADISE. 


239 


ence with all its heavenly environment, from the sim¬ 
plest pleasure that gladdens the redeemed soul to 
the loftiest display of God’s glory when He unveils 
Himself to His glorified saints, as they worship be¬ 
fore His celestial throne. 

The idea of a Paradise beyond the grave is one 
of the most poetical and attractive to the human 
mind. Our churches resound with the rhythmic 
song,— 


“ O Paradise! O Paradise ! 

Who doth not crave for rest ? 

Who would not seek the happy land, 

Where they that loved are blessed ? ” 

But do you sing it in truth ? Do you really crave 
for the “rest that remaineth for the people of 
God ” ? Do you truly seek the happy land where 
Jesus is ? Do you long to stand in the light with 
loyal hearts and true? Then are you of course 
looking to Christ as the way, the truth, the life, and 
light of men ? Do this, and you shall live. 





























































































































































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